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The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) has just released a first update on the quantity of physical gold and silver holdings stored in the ‘LBMA’ London vaulting network. The LBMA press release explaining the move, dated 31 July, can be read here.

This vaulting network, administered by the LBMA, comprises a set of precious metals vaults situated in London that are operated by the Bank of England and 7 commercial vault operators. For simplicity, this set of vaults can be called the LBMA London vaults. The 7 commercial vault operators are HSBC, Brinks, ICBC Standard Bank, Malca Amit, JP Morgan, Loomis and G4S. ICBC Standard outsources its vault management to Brinks. It’s possible that to some extent HSBC also outsources some of its vault management to Brinks.

Strangely, the LBMA’s initial reporting strangely only runs up to 31 March 2017, which is 4-months prior to the first publication date of 31 July. This is despite the fact that new LBMA vault holdings data is supposed to be published on a 3-month lagged basis, which would imply a latest report coverage date of 30 April.

At the end of April 2017, the Bank of England separately began publication of gold vault holdings for the gold bars that the Bank stores in custody within its own vaults. The Bank of England reporting is also on a 3-month lagged basis (and the Bank actually adheres to this reporting lag). See BullionStar article “Bank of England releases new data on its gold vault holdings”, dated 28 April 2017, for details of the Bank of England vault reporting initiative.

Currently, the Bank of England is therefore 1 month ahead of the LBMA vault data, i.e. on 31 July 2017, the Bank of England’s gold page was updated with Bank of England gold custody vault holdings as of 30 April 2017.

Ignoring the LBMA 3-month lagged vs 4-month lagged anomaly, the LBMA’s first vault reporting update, for vault data as of 31 March 2017, states that the 8 sets of vaults in question (which includes the Bank of England gold vaults) held a combined 7449 tonnes of gold and a combined 32078 tonnes of silver.

Also included in the first batch of LBMA data are comparable London vault holdings figures for gold and silver for each month-end date from July 2016 to February 2016 inclusive. Therefore, as of the 31 July 2017, there is now an LBMA dataset of 9 months of data, which will be augmented by one month each month going forward. Whether the LBMA will play catch-up and publish April 2017 month-end and May 2017 month-end figures simultaneously at the next reporting date of 31 August 2017 remains to be seen.

One of the Bank of England gold vaults

The New Vault Data – Gold and Silver

For 31 March 2017, the LBMA is reporting 7449 tonnes of gold stored across the 8 sets of vault locations. For the same date, the Bank of England reported 5081 tonnes of gold held in the Bank of England vaults. Therefore, as of 31 March 2017, there were 2368 tonnes of gold ‘not in the Bank of England vaults’ (or at least 2368 tonnes of gold not counted by the Bank of England data).

Of the gold not in the Bank of England vaults, about 1510 tonnes of this gold in London was held by gold-backed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), mainly with the custodians HSBC and JP Morgan. These ETFs include the SPDR Gold Trust and various ETFs from ETF Securities, Source, iShares, and Deutsche Bank etc. This 1510 tonnes figure is taken from an estimate calculated at the end of April 2017 using data from the GoldChartsRUs website. See BullionStar article “Summer of 17: LBMA Confirms Upcoming Publication of London Gold Vault Holdings” dated 9 May 2017 for details of this ETF calculation.

Subtracting this 1510 tonnes of ETF gold from the 2368 tonnes of gold stored outside the Bank of England vaults means that as of 31 March 2017, there were only about 858 tonnes of gold stored in the LBMA vaults outside of the Bank of England vaults that was not held by gold-backed ETF holdings. See Table 1 below.

The lowest gold holdings number reported by the LBMA within its 9 months of vault data is actually the first month, i.e. July 2016. At month-end July 2016, the LBMA report shows total vaulted gold of 7283 tonnes. There was therefore a net addition of 166 tonnes of gold to the LBMA vaults between August 2016 and the end of March 2017, with net additions over the August to October 2016 period, followed by net declines over the November 2016 to February 2017 period.

Turning to silver, as of 31 March 2017, the LBMA is reporting total vaulted silver of 32,078 tonnes held in London vaults. The vaulted silver data also shows a notable increase over the period from the end of July 2016 to the end of March 2017, with a net 2485 tonnes of silver added to the vaults.

Since the Bank of England vaults only store gold in custody on behalf of customers and do not store silver, there are no silver holdings at the Bank of England and therefore there is no specific Bank of England silver reporting. The LBMA silver data therefore refers purely to silver vaulted with operators such as Brinks, JP Morgan, Malca Amit, HSBC, and Loomis.

There are currently at least 12,000 tonnes of silver stored in London on behalf of silver-backed ETFs such as the iShares Silver Trust (SLV), various ETF Securities products, a SOURCE ETF and some Deutsche Bank ETFs. Subtracting these ETF holdings from the full 32,078 tonne figure being reported by the LBMA would suggest that there are an additional ~ 20,000 tonnes of non-ETF silver held in the London vaults.

Table 2: LBMA London Vaults – Silver holdings, July 2016 – March 2017How small is the London gold float?

Previous Vault Estimates for Gold and Silver

Prior to the new LBMA and Bank of England vault holdings data reports, the only way to work out how much gold and silver were in the London vaulting network was through estimation. Between 2015 and 2017, a number of these estimates were calculated for gold and published on the BullionStar website and the GoldChartsRUs website.

The “Tracking the gold held in London” article, published on 5 October 2016, took a LBMA statement of 6500 tonnes of gold being in London, the earliest reference to which was from 8 February 2016 Internet Archive page cache, and also took a Bank of England statement that the Bank held 4725 tonnes as of the end of February 2016 period, and then it factored in that the UK net imported more than 800 tonnes of non-monetary gold up to August 2016, and also that ETFs had added about 399 tonnes over the same period. It also calculated, using GoldChartsRUS ETF data, that the London-based gold-backed ETFs held about 1679 tonnes of gold as of the end of September 2016.

Therefore, as of the end of September 2016, there could have been at least 7300 tonnes of gold held across the LBMA and Bank of England vaults, i.e. 6500 tonnes + 800 tonnes = 7300 tonnes. As it turns out, this estimate was quite close to the actual quantity of gold held in the LBMA and Bank of England vaults at the end of September 2016, which the LBMA’s new reporting now confirms to have been 7590 tonnes. The estimate is a lower number because it was unclear as to which initial date the LBMA’s 6500 tonnes reference referred to (in early 2016 or before).

Previous Vault Estimates Silver

At the beginning of July 2017, an article on the BullionStar website titled “How many Silver Bars are in the LBMA Vaults in London?” estimated that there were about 12,000 tonnes of Good Delivery silver bars held across 4 LBMA vault operators in London on behalf of 11 silver-backed Exchange Traded Funds. These ETFs and the distribution of their silver bars across the 4 vault operators of Brinks, Malca Amit, JP Morgan and HSBC can be seen in the following table.

Table 3: ETF Silver held across LBMA commercial vaults in London, early July 2017

The above article about the number of silver bars in the London vaults also drew on some data from precious metals consultancy Thomson Reuters GFMS, which each year publishes a table of identifiable above ground global silver supply in its World Silver Survey. One category of silver within the GFMS identifiable above ground silver inventories is called ‘Custodian Vaults’. This is distinct from silver holdings in ETFs and silver holdings in exchange inventories such as in COMEX approved vaults in New York. A simple way to view ‘Custodian Vaults’ silver holdings is as an opaque ‘unreported holdings’ category as opposed to the more the transparent ETF holdings and COMEX holdings categories.

For 2016, according to GFMS, this ‘Custodian Vaults’ silver amounted to 1571.2 million ounces (48,871 tonnes), of which 488.7 million ounces (15,200 tonnes), or 31% was represented by what GFMS calls the ‘Europe’ region. Unfortunately, GFMS do not break out the ‘Custodian Vaults’ numbers by individual country because they say that they receive the data on a confidential basis and cannot divulge the granularity. The early July article on BullionStar had speculated that:

“With 488.7 million ozs (15,201 tonnes) of silver held in Europe in ‘Custodian vaults’ that is not reported anywhere, at least some of this silver must be held in London, which is one of the world’s largest financial centers and the world’s highest trading volume silver market.”

“Apart from London, there would presumably also be significant physical silver holdings vaulted in Switzerland and to a lessor extent in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and maybe Austria etc. So whats’s a suitable percentage for London? Given London’s extensive vaulting network and prominence as a hedge fund and institutional investment centre, a 40-50% share of the European ‘custodian vault’ silver holdings would not be unrealistic, with the other big percentage probably vaulted in Switzerland.

This would therefore put previously ‘Unreported’ silver holdings in the London vaults at between 6080 tonnes and 7600 tonnes (or an additional 182,000 to 230,000 Good Delivery Silver bars).

Adding this range of 6080 – 7600 tonnes to the 12,040 tonne figure that the 11 ETFs above hold, gives a total figure of 18,120 – 19,640 tonnes of silver stored in the LBMA vaults in London (545,000 – 585,000 Good Delivery silver bars).

But here’s the catch. With the LBMA now saying that as of the end of March 2017 there were 1.031 billion ounces of silver, or 32078 tonnes, stored in the LBMA vaulting network in London (and 31238 tonnes of silver in London as of end of December 2016), of which at least 12,000 tonnes is in silver-backed ETFs, then that still leaves about 20,000 tonnes of silver in the London vaults, which is higher than the silver total attributed to the entire ‘custodian vault’ category’ in Europe (as per the GFMS 2016 report).

Even the lowest quantity in the 9 months that the LBMA reports on, which is month-end July 2016, states that the LBMA vaults held 951,433,000 ounces (29,593 tonnes), which after excluding silver ETFs in London, is still higher than the total ‘Custodian Vault’ category that GFMS attributes to the European region in 2016.

These new LBMA vault figures are basically implying that all of the GFMS custodian vault figure for Europe (and some more) is all held in London and not anywhere else in Europe. But that could not be the case as there is also a lot of silver vaulted in Switzerland and other European countries such as Germany, to think of but a few.

This begs the question, does the GFMS Custodian vault number for Europe need to be updated to reflect the gap between the non-ETF holdings that LBMA claims are in the London vaults and what GFMS is reporting in a European ‘Custodian vaults’ category? If the LBMA reporting actually broke down the silver vaulting quantity number into Good Delivery silver bars and other categories, it might help solve this puzzle as it would give an indication of how much of this 32,000 tonnes of silver is in the form of bars that are accepted for settlement in the London Silver Market i.e. Good Delivery silver bars.

Could some of this 32,000 tonnes of silver be in the form of silver jewellery, and private holdings of silver antiques and even silver artifacts? On the surface the LBMA reporting appears to say not since it states that:

“jewellery and other private holdings held by retailers, individuals and smaller vaults not included in the London Clearing system are not included in the numbers”

But because this statement reads rather ambiguously, by implication another interpretation of the LBMA statement could be that:

“jewellery and other private holdings held by retailers and individuals in vaults that are part of the London Clearing system are included in the numbers”

The London Clearing system here refers to the vaults of the 7 commercial vault operators.

Until GFMS comes back with a possible clarification of its ‘Custodian Vault’ figure for Europe, then this contradiction between the LBMA data for silver and GFMS data for silver will persist.

The HSBC vault in London containing the GLD gold

Large Bars but also Small Bars and Gold Coins

According to the LBMA’s press release, while “the LBMA vault holding data …represent the volume of Loco London gold and silver held in the London vaults offering custodian services“, surprisingly the new LBMA data includes “all physical forms of metal inclusive of large wholesale bars, coin, kilo bars and small bars.”

The inclusion of gold coins, smaller gold bars and gold kilobars in the LBMA vault data is bizarre because only large wholesale bars are accepted as Good Delivery in the London gold and silver markets, not gold coin, not smaller bars, and not gold kilobars. Even the LBMA website states that “the term Loco London refers to gold and silver bullion that is physically held in London. Only LBMA Good Delivery bars are acceptable for trading in the London market.”

Furthermore, the entire physical London Gold Market and physical London Silver Market revolve around the LBMA Good Delivery lists. Spot, forward and options trades on the London OTC gold and silver market are only referenced to a unit of delivery of a Good Delivery bar, both for gold and for silver.

This is the London Good Delivery gold bar. It must have a minimum fineness of 995.0 and a gold content of between 350 and 430 fine ounces….. Bars are generally close to 400 ounces or 12.5 kilograms”

For silver, the same guide states that:

“Unit for Delivery of Loco London Silver

This is the London Good Delivery silver bar. It must have a minimum fineness of 999 and a weight range between 750 and 1,100 ounces, although it is recommended that ideally bars should be produced within the range of 900 to 1,050 ounces. Bars generally weigh around 1,000 ounces.”

Additionally, all the new London-based gold futures contracts launched by the LME, ICE and CME also reference, if only virtually, the unit for Delivery of loco London gold, i.e. the London Good Delivery gold bar. They do not reference smaller gold bars or gold coins.

In contrast to the LBMA , the COMEX exchange where the famous COMEX 100 ounce gold futures contract is traded only reports vault inventories of gold and silver where the bars satisfy that contract for delivery, i.e. the contract for delivery is one hundred (100) troy ounces of minimum fineness 995 gold of an approved brand in the form of either “one 100 troy ounce bar, or three 1 kilo bars”. COMEX do not report 400 oz gold bars or gold coins specifically because the contract has nothing to do with these products. Then why is the LBMA reporting on forms of gold that have nothing to do with the settlement norms of its OTC products in London?

Additionally, the LBMA website also states that “only bars produced by refiners on the [Good Delivery] Lists can be traded in the London market.“ All of this begs the question, why does the LBMA bother including smaller bars, kilogram bars and gold coins? These bars cannot be used in settlement or delivery for any standard London Gold Market transactions.

Perhaps these smaller gold bars and gold coins have been included in the statistics so as to boost the total reported figures or to make reverse engineering of the numbers more difficult? While the combined volumes of smaller bars and kilobars probably don’t add up to much in terms of tonnage, the combined gold coin holdings of central banks stored at the Bank of England could be material.

For example, the United Kingdom, through HM Treasury’s Exchange Equalisation Account (EEA), claims to hold 310.3 tonnes of gold in its reserves, all of which is held in custody at the Bank of England. The latest EEA accounts for 2016/2017, published 18 July 2017 state that “The gold bars and gold coin in the reserves were stored physically at the Bank’s premises.” See Page 43, Exchange Equalisation Accounts for details. Many more central banks, for historical reasons, also hold gold coins in their reserves. See Bullionstar article “Central Banks and Governments and their gold coin holdings” for some examples.

As another example, the Banque de France in Paris holds 2435 tonnes of gold of which 100 tonnes is in the form of gold coins, and 2,335 tonnes of gold bars. Even though these gold coins are held in Paris, this shows that central bank gold coin holdings could materially affect LBMA gold reporting that includes ‘gold coins‘ within the rolled up number. But such gold coins cannot be traded within the LBMA / LPMCL gold trading / gold clearing system and if present would overstate the number of Good delivery gold bars within the system.

The Bank of England gold page on its website also only refers to Good Delivery ‘gold bars’ and says nothing about gold coins, which underlines the special status to which the Bank of England assigns Good Delivery gold bars in the London Gold Market. Specifically, the BoE gold page states that:

“..we provide gold storage on an allocated basis, meaning that the customer retains the title to specific gold bars in our vaults”

“Values are given in thousands of fine troy ounces. Fine troy ounces denote only the pure gold content of a bar.

“We only accept bars which comply with London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) London Good Delivery (LGD) standards. LGD bars must meet a certain minimum fineness and weight. A typical gold bar weighs around 400 oz“

The Bank of England has now confirmed to me, however, that the gold holdings number that it reports on its website “is the total of all gold held at the Bank” and that this “includes coins that belong to the Exchange Equalisation Account (EEA) which are held by the Bank on behalf of Her Majesty’s Treasury (HMT)”

This means that the total gold number being reported by both the Bank of England and the LBMA needs to be adjusted downward by some percentage so as to reflect the amount of real Good Delivery gold bars in the London vaults. What this downward adjustment should be is unclear, as neither the Bank of England nor the LBMA break out their figures by category of gold bars versus gold coins.

LBMA numbers – Obscured Rolled-up numbers

Another shortcoming in the LBMA’s vault reporting is that it does not break down the gold and silver holdings per individual vault. The LBMA will be only releasing 2 highly rolled-up numbers per month, one for gold and one for silver, for example, 7449 tones for gold and 32078 tonnes for silver in the latest month.

Contrast this to New York based COMEX and ICE gold futures daily reporting, which both do break down the gold holdings per New York vault. Realistically, the LBMA was never going to report gold or silver holdings per vault, as this would be a bridge too far towards real transparency, and would show how much or how little gold and silver is stored by each London vault operator / at each London vault location.

This does not, however, stop the LBMA from claiming transparency and in its 31 July press release it states that:

“According to the Fair and Effective Markets Review (see here for further details) ‘…in markets where OTC trading remains the preferred model, authorities and market participants should continue to explore the scope for improving transparency, in ways that also enhance effectiveness.’“

Real transparency, as opposed to lip-service transparency, would be supported by providing an individual breakdown of the number of Good Delivery gold and silver bars stored in each of the 8 sets of vaults at each month end. If they want to include gold coins, smaller gold bars, and gold kilo bars as extra categories, then this could also be itemised on a proper report. It would also only take any decent software developer about 1 day to write and create such a report.

There is also the issue of independently auditing these LBMA numbers. The issue is essentially that there is no independent auditing of these LBMA numbers nor will there be. So there is no second opinion as to whether the data is accurate or not.

The Bank of England gold vault reporting is also short of transparency as it does not provide a breakdown of how much of the reported gold is held by central banks, how much gold is held by bullion banks, how much of the central bank gold is out on loan with the bullion banks, and how much gold, if any, is held on behalf of ETFs at the Bank of England as sub-custodian. Real transparency in this area would provide all of this information including how much gold the LPMCL bullion clearing banks HSBC, JP Morgan, UBS, Scotia Mocatta and ICBC Standard hold at the Bank of England vaults.

On the issue of ETF gold held at the Bank of England, it has been proven that at times the Bank of England has acted as a gold custodian for an ETF, for example, during the first quarter 2016, the SPDR Gold Trust held up to 29 tonnes of gold at the Bank of England, with the Bank of England acting in the capacity of sub-custodian to the SPDR Gold Trust. See BullionStar article “SPDR Gold Trust gold bars at the Bank of England vaults” for details.

The London Float

The most important question with this new LBMA vault reporting is how much of the 7449 tonnes of gold stored in London as of the end of March 2017 is owned or controlled by bullion banks.

Or more specifically, what is the total level of LBMA bullion bank unallocated gold liabilities in the London market compared to the amount of real physical gold bars that they own or control.

This ‘gold owned or controlled by the bullion banks’ metric can be referred to as the ‘London Float’. LBMA bullion banks can maintain their own holdings of gold bars which they buy in the market or import directly, and they can also borrow other people’s gold thereby controlling this gold also. Some of this gold can be in the LBMA commercial vaults. Some can also be in the Bank of England vaults.

In its press release, the LBMA states that:

“The physical holdings of precious metals held in the London vaults underpin the gross daily trading and net clearing in London.”

This is not exactly true. Only gold which is owned or controlled by the bullion banks can underpin gold trading in London. Allocated gold sitting in a vault that is owned by central banks, ETFs or investors and which does not have any other claim attached to it, does not underpin anything. It just sits there in a vault.

As regards gold bars stored in the LBMA vaults in London, these bars can either be owned by central banks at the Bank of England, owned by central banks at commercial vaults in London, owned by ETFs at the commercial vaults in London, owned or controlled by bullion banks, and owned by investors (either institutional investors, hedge funds, private individuals etc). On occasion, some ETF gold has at various times been at the Bank of England.

If central bank gold is held in allocated form and not lent out, then it is ‘off the market’ and can’t be ‘used’ by any other party such as a LBMA bullion bank. If central bank gold is lent out or swapped out to bullion banks, then it can be used or even sold by those bullion banks. The LBMA uses the euphemism ‘liquidity’ to refer to this gold lending. For example, from the LBMA’s recent press release on the new vault reporting it says:

“In addition, the Bank of England also offers gold custodial services to central banks and certain commercial firms, that facilitate central bank access to the liquidity of the London gold market.”

ETF gold when it is held within an ETF cannot legally be used by other entities since it is owned by the ETF and allocated to the ETF. Institutionally owned gold or private owned gold when it is allocated is owned by the holder. It could in theory be lent to bullion banks also.

Some of the LBMA bullion banks have gold accounts at the Bank of England. How many of these banks maintain gold holdings within the Bank of England vaults nobody will say, not the Bank of England nor the LBMA nor the bullion banks, but it at least extends to the 5 members of London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL) which are HSBC, JP Morgan, Scotia Mocatta, ICBC Standard and UBS. Gold accounts for bullion banks undoubtedly also extend to additional bullion banks beyond the LPMCL members because many bullion banks have been involved in gold lending at the Bank of England for a long time, for example Standard Chartered, Barclays, Natixis, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs, and these banks would at some point have to take delivery of borrowed gold at the Bank of England.

Note, the gold brokers of the London Gold Market have for a long time, as least since the 1970s, been able to store some of their gold bars at the Bank of England vaults. These brokers were historically Samuel Montagu, Mocatta, the old Sharps Pixley, NM Rothschild and Johnson Matthey.

Since LBMA bullion banks can maintain gold accounts at the LBMA commercial vaults in London, and because some of these banks have gold accounts at the Bank of England also, then this London “gold float” can comprise gold bars at the commercial vaults and gold bars at the Bank of England vaults. It is however, quite difficult to say exactly what size this London bullion bank gold float is at any given time.

Whatever the actual number, its not very big in size because if you subtract central bank gold and ETF gold from the overall LBMA gold figure (of 7449 tonnes as of the end of March 2017) then whatever is left is not a very big quantity of gold bars, and at least some of this residual gold stored in the LBMA commercial vaults is owned by institutions, hedge funds, private individuals and platforms such as BullionVault.

In September 2015, a study of central bank gold held at the Bank of England calculated that about 3779 tonnes of Bank of England custody gold can be accounted for by central bank and monetary authority gold holdings. See “Central bank gold at the Bank of England” for details and GoldChartsRUs page “LBMA/BOE VAULTED GOLD, 2016 Update – The London Float”. Compared to the 4725 tonnes of gold held at the Bank of England at the end of February 2016, this would then mean that there were about 946 tonnes of gold at the Bank of England that was “unaccounted for by central banks”. This was about 20% of the total amount of gold held at the Bank of England at that time.

However, some of this 946 tonnes was probably central bank gold where the central bank owner had not publicly divulged that it held gold at the Bank of England. Many central banks around the world that were contacted as part of the research into the “central bank gold at the Bank of England calculation” either didn’t reply or replied that they could not confirm where their gold was stored. See BullionStar article “Central Banks’ secrecy and silence on gold storage arrangements” for more details.

After factoring in these unknown central bank gold holders at the Bank of England, the remaining residual would be bullion bank gold. It could therefore be assumed that a percentage of gold stored at Bank of England, somewhere less than 20% and probably also less than 10%, is owned by bullion banks. Since central bank gold holdings, on paper at least are relatively static, the monthly changes in gold holdings at the Bank of England therefore probably mainly reflect bullion bank gold movements rather than central bank gold movements.

If we look back now at the LBMA vault data for gold as of 31 March 2017, how much of this gold could be bullion banks (London float) gold.

LBMA total gold vaulted: 7449 tonnes

Bank of England gold vaulted: 5081 tonnes

Gold in commercial LBMA vaults: 2368 tonnes

Gold in ETFs: 1510 tonnes

Gold in commercial vaults not in ETFs: 858 tonnes

Gold in commercial vaults not in ETFs that is allocated to institutions & hedge funds = x

i.e. 7449 – 5081 = 2368 – 1510 = 858

Assume 10% of the gold at the Bank of England is bullion bank gold. Also assume bullion banks gold hold some gold in LBMA commercial vaults.

Since x has to be > 0, then the bullion bank London float is definitely less than 1300 tonnes and probably less than 1000 tonnes. The bullion banks might argue that they can borrow more gold from central banks, take gold out of the ETFs, and even import gold from refineries. All of these options are possible, but still, the London bullion bank float is not that large. And it is this number in tonnes of gold which should be compared to the enormous volumes of ‘paper gold’ trading that occur in the London Gold Market each and every trading day.

For example in June 2017, the LBMA clearing statistics state that 21 million ounces of gold was cleared each trading day in the London Gold Market. That’s 653 tonnes of gold cleared each day in London. With a 10 to 1 ratio of gold trading to gold clearing, that’s the equivalent of 6530 tonnes of gold traded each day in the London gold market, or 143,660 tonnes over the 22 trading days of June. Annualised, this is 1.632 million tonnes of gold traded per year (using 250 trading days per year).

And sitting at the bottom of this trading pyramid is probably less than 1000 tonnes of bullion bank gold underpinning the gigantic trading volumes and huge unallocated gold liabilities of the bullion banks. So you can see that the London gold trading system is a fractional-reserve system with tiny physical gold underpinnings.

In May 2011, during a presentation at the LBMA Bullion Market Forum in Shanghai China, on the topic of London gold vaults, former LBMA CEO Stewart Murray included a slide which stated that:

Investment – more than ETFs

ETFs

Gold Holdings have increased by ~1,800 tonnes in past 5 years, almost all held in London vaults

Many thousands of tonnes of ETF silver are held in London

Other holdings

Central banks hold large amounts of allocated gold at the Bank of England

Various investors hold very substantial amounts unallocated gold and silver in the London vaults

The last bullet point of the above slide is particularly interesting as it references “very substantial amounts’ of unallocated gold and silver. Discounting the fact for a moment that unallocated gold and silver is not necessarily held in vaults or held anywhere else, given that it’s just a claim against a bullion bank, the statement really means that investors have ‘very substantial amounts‘ of claims against the bullion banks offering the unallocated gold and silver accounts i.e. very substantial liabilities in the form of unallocated gold and silver obligations to the gold and silver unallocated account holders.

If a small percentage of these claim holders / investors decided to convert their claims into allocated gold and silver, especially allocated gold, then where are the bullion banks going to get the physical gold to give to these converting claim holders? Neither do the claim holders of unallocated positions have any way of knowing how accurate the LBMA vault reporting is, because there is no independent auditing of the positions or of the report.

Joni Teves, UBS, and Ruth Crowell, LBMA CEO

UBS and LBMA

The last line of the LBMA press release about the new vault reporting states the following:

This line includes an embedded link to the Teves report within the press release. This opens a 7 page report written by Teves about the new vault reporting. By definition, given that this report is linked to in the press release, it means that Joni Teves of UBS had the LBMA vault reporting data before it was publicly released, otherwise how could UBS have written its summary.

In her report, Teves states that a UBS database estimates that there are “1,485 tonnes of gold worth about $60bn and about 13,759 tonnes of silver worth about $7.85bn are likely to be held in London to back ETF shares“.

These UBS numbers are fairly similar to the ETF estimates for gold (1510 tonnes) and silver (12040 tonnes) that we came up with here at BullionStar, and so to some extent corroborate our previous ETF estimates. Teves also implies that some of the gold in the Bank of England figure is not central bank gold but is commercial bank gold as she says:

“let’s say for illustration’s sake that about 80% to 90% of BoE gold holdings are accounted for by the official sector.“

The statement on face value implies that 10% – 20% of Bank of England gold is not central bank gold. But why the grey area phrase of “let’s say for illustration’s sake”. Shouldn’t the legendary Swiss Bank UBS be more scientific than this?

Teves also says assume “negligible amount (in commercial vaults) comprises official sector holdings“, and she concludes that “this suggests that over the past year, an average of about 2,945 to 3,450 tonnes ($119-$139 bn) of investment-related gold was held in London.”

What she is doing here is taking the average of 9 months of gold holdings held in the LBMA commercial vaults (which is 2439 tonnes) and then adding 10% and 20% respectively of the 9 month average of gold held at the Bank of England (which is 506 and 1011 tonnes) to get the resulting range of between 2945 and 3451 tonnes.

Then she takes the ETF tonnes estimate (1485) away from her range to get a range of between 1460 and 1965 tonnes, as she states:

… “Taking these ETF-related holdings into account would then leave roughly around 1,460 to 1,965 tonnes or about $59bn to $79bn worth of gold in unallocated and allocated accounts as available pool of liquidity for OTC trading activities“

But what this assumption fails to take into account is that some of this 1,460 to 1,965 tonnes that is in allocated accounts is not available as a pool of liquidity, because it is held in allocated form by investors precisely so that the bullion banks cannot get their hands on it and trade with it. In other words, it is ring fenced. Either way, a model will always output what has been input into it. Change the 10% and 20% range assumptions about the amount of commercial bank gold in the Bank of England vaults and this materially alters the numbers that can be attributed to be an ‘available pool of liquidity for OTC trading activities’.

Additionally, the portion of this residual gold that is in ‘unallocated accounts’ is not owned by any investors, it is owned by the banks. The ‘unallocated accounts’ holders merely have claims on the bullion banks for metal that is backed by a fractional-reserve trading system.

In her commentary about the silver held in the London vaults, Teves does not comment at all about the huge gap between her ETF silver in London (which UBS states as 13,759 tonnes), and the full 32000 tonnes reported by the LBMA,and does not mention how this huge gap is larger than all the ‘Custodian Vault’ silver which Thomson Reuters GFMS attributes to the entire ‘Europe’ region.

Conclusion

The amount of gold in the London LBMA gold vaults (incl. Bank of England) that is not central bank gold, that is not ETF gold, and that is not institutional allocated gold is quite a low number. What this actual number is difficult to say because a) the LBMA will not produce a proper vault report that shows ownership of gold by category of holder, and b) neither will the Bank of England in its gold vault reporting provide a breakdown between the gold owned by central banks and the gold owned by bullion banks. So there is still no real transparency in this area. Just a faint chink of light into a dark cavern.

On the topic of London vaulted silver, there appears to be a lot more silver in the LBMA vaults than even GFMS thought there was. It will be interesting to see how GFMS and the LBMA will resolve their apparent contradiction on the amount of silver stored in the London LBMA vaults.

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Sometime in the coming days, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) plans to begin publishing gold and silver vault holding totals covering the network of commercial precious vault operators in London that fall under its remit. This follows an announcement made by the LBMA on 8 May.

There are seven commercial vault operators (custodians) in the LBMA custodian vault network namely, HSBC, JP Morgan, Brinks, Malca Amit, ICBC Standard Bank, Loomis (formerly Viamat), and G4S. Note that ICBC Standard Bank has a vault which is operated by Brinks on behalf of ICBC Standard. It is also quite possible that some of the HSBC vaults, such as the famous GLD gold vault, are located within Brinks facilities.

Adding in the Bank of England gold vaults under the Bank of England’s head office in the City of London, the LBMA vaulting network comprises eight sets of vaults. However, the Bank of England vaults do not store silver, or at least there is no evidence that the Bank of England stores silver. However, the other 7 vault operators can and do store silver, or at least most of them do. It’s unclear whether the G4S vault stores anything on behalf of anyone, but that’s a different story.

The forthcoming LBMA vault data will represent actual physical gold and silver holdings, i.e. real tangible precious metals, as opposed to the intangible and gargantuan paper gold and paper silver trading volumes generated each day in the London precious metals markets.

The LBMA will report physical holdings data on an aggregated basis for each of gold and silver, i.e. one quantity number will be reported each month for vaulted gold, and one quantity number will be reported each month for vaulted silver. The LBMA data will be on a 3-month lagged basis. For example, if the LBMA begins reporting this data in early July (which it probably will), then the first set of data will refer to the end of March period.

The uncertainty as to when the LBMA will begin to publish its vault holdings data is purely because the LBMA has not provided a specific publication commencement date. At first, the LBMA announced that the reporting would begin “in the summer”. Subsequently, it announced that it’s vault reporting would begin in July.

As to whether the LBMA vault holdings numbers published each month will include or exclude the Bank of England gold vaults holdings is also unclear. At the end of April, the Bank of England went ahead and separately began to publish vault holdings numbers for its own gold vaults, also on a 3-month lagged basis. More information on this Bank of England initiative can be read in BullionStar blog “Bank of England releases new data on its gold vault holdings”

Incidentally, the Bank of England has now updated its website (updated 30 June) with the gold holdings figure for its vaults as of the end of March, and is reporting total physical gold holdings of 163.36 million troy ounces, which equates to 5081 tonnes of gold.

When the LBMA begins to publish its numbers, it will be clear as to whether the LBMA gold number includes the Bank of England gold holdings or not, and this will probably even be specified in a footnote of the report. Excluding the Bank of England vaults (or at least the non-loaned gold in the Bank of England vaults which is not under the title of bullion banks), the remaining lion’s share of the LBMA’s gold holdings number comprises gold held by Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in London.

“The HSBC vault in London holds gold on behalf of the SPDR Gold Trust (currently 853 tonnes) and ETF Securities (about 215 tonnes). The JP Morgan gold vault in London holds gold on behalf of ETFs run by iShares (about 210 tonnes in London), Deutsche Bank (95 tonnes), and Source (100 tonnes). An ABSA ETF holds about 36 tonnes of gold with Brinks in London. In total, these ETFs represent about 1510 tonnes of gold.”

The approach used to calculate the gold stored by these ETFs in the London vaults can be seen in the article “Tracking the gold held in London: An update on ETF and BoE holdings”. To this 1510 tonnes gold figure we can add gold held on behalf of customers of BullionVault and GoldMoney – which is roughly 12 tonnes of gold between them (4.75 tonnes for GoldMoney, and 7.2 tonnes of gold for BullionVault).

When the LBMA publishes its first gold total for gold held in its vault network, it will also be clear as to whether the LBMA vaults hold any significant amount of physical gold above and beyond the gold allocated within the gold-backed ETFs. There may be some gold tonnage held on an allocated basis by the LBMA bullion banks as a ‘float’, and also some gold held in allocated form by various institutional investors such as hedge funds, but my hunch is that this residual gold will be at most a respectable fraction of the amount of gold stored on behalf of ETFs in London.

However, the silver holdings in the LBMA vault network are a different kettle of fish entirely, and in addition to ETF holdings (which are reported), there could be significant silver holdings in the London vaults which have gone unreported up until now (unreported silver in the form of what consultancy GFMS calls ‘Custodian Vault’ holdings).

Reported Silver

Although gold usually generates the most headlines, it’s important not to forget about silver, and the fact that this new LBMA reporting will also provide a monthly aggregated total for the amount of physical silver held in the LBMA vaulting network in London. The silver stored in these LBMA vaults is in the form of variable weight London Good Delivery silver bars.

Since silver has a lower value to weight ratio than gold and is bulkier to store, silver a) takes up more room and b) can be stored in secure warehouses rather than ultra-high secure vaults that are used to store gold. This is particularly true in expensive cities such as London where it is more economical to store silver in locations with lower commercial rental values.

In the LBMA vaulting network, London Good Delivery silver bars are stored 30 bars per pallet, i.e. a formation of 10 bars stacked 3 bars high. Since each bar weighs approximately 1000 oz, each pallet will weigh about 30,000 ozs, i.e. each pallet would weigh about 1 tonne.

‘1000 oz’ Silver Bars – 30 bars per pallet

At this stage, can we arrive at an estimate of the minimum amount of silver currently held in the LBMA London vaulting network? The answer is yes, for the simple reason that, in a similar manner to gold-backed ETFs, a substantial number of silver-backed ETFs also hold their silver in the vaults of London-based precious metals vaulting custodians, and these ETFs publicly report their silver bar holdings.

In addition, BullionVault and GoldMoney (which are not ETFs), both hold silver with one of the custodians in the LBMA vaulting network – Loomis. But I have included the BullionVault and GoldMoney silver totals below purely because even though they are non-ETF custodian vault holdings, both companies’ silver holdings are publicly reported on their websites.

However, there is probably also a lot more additional silver held in the London vaults above and beyond the silver bars allocated to ETFs and the known silver stored by GoldMoney and BullionVault. Some of this additional silver falls under what Thomson Reuters GFMS classify as ‘Custodian Vault‘ silver, which is silver that is basically in an ‘Unreported’ category but which Thomson Reuters GFMS seems to think it knows about through its own ‘proprietary surveys’ and ‘field research’. This ‘Custodian Vault’ silver probably accounts for a substantial amount of silver in the London vaults. However, it is difficult to know because GFMS does not provide granularity on its numbers beyond an overall ‘Europe’ number. But I have made some assumptions about this ‘Custodian Vault’ silver in London, which is discussed in a final section below.

Silver ETFs

For the silver-backed ETFs, the first step is to identify which silver ETFs hold silver bars in the LBMA vaults in London. Using the list of silver ETF providers specified on Nick Laird’s GoldChartsRUs website (subscription only), the platform providers and their ETFs which hold silver in the LBMA vaults in London are as follows:

iShares: 1 ETF

ETF Securities: 6 ETFs

SOURCE : 1 ETF

Deutsche Bank: 3 ETFs

Between them, these four providers offer 11 ETFs that hold some or all of their silver in LBMA London vaults. This silver is held with custodians JP Morgan and HSBC, and with sub-custodians, Brinks and Malca Amit. Note, that GoldMoney and BullionVault store silver in London with Loomis as custodian.

As publicly traded vehicles, most of these ETFs publish daily silver bar weight lists or holdings files and they also undergo twice yearly physical audits by independent auditors. These weight lists and audits documents are helpful in pinpointing who the custodians and sub-custodians are, which locations these silver ETF’s store their silver in, and how much silver (in silver bar form) is stored in each location.

iShares Silver Trust (SLV)

The iShares Silver Trust, ticker code SLV, is the world’s largest silver-backed ETF. It’s probably best to think of SLV as the silver equivalent of the mammoth SPDR Gold Trust (GLD).

The custodian for SLV is JP Morgan Chase Bank (London Branch), and Brinks also acts as a sub-custodian for SLV. SLV holds silver in vaults across both London and New York. According to the SLV daily silver bar weight list, SLV’s silver bars are held in two Brinks vaults in London, one JP Morgan vault in London, and one JP Morgan vault in New York.

As of 29 June 2017, SLV reported that it was holding 348,841 Good Delivery silver bars containing a total of 339.89 million troy ounces of silver, or a colossal 10,572 tonnes of silver. The actual SLV bar list, which is uploaded to a JP Morgan website in pdf format using the same filename each day, can be seen here, but be warned that the file is about 5370 pages long, so there’s no real need to open it unless you are curious. A screenshot of the top of the first page is provided below

The SLV weight list specifies that the SLV silver is held in a ‘Brinks London‘ vault, a ‘Brinks London C‘ vault, a ‘JPM London V‘ vault, and a ‘JPM New York‘ vault. Between them, 2 Brinks vaults in London hold 55% of SLV’s silver bars representing 5753 tonnes, or 54% of the silver held in SLV. Adding in the ‘JPM London V‘ vault means that 289,053 silver bars, weighing 8720 tonnes (or 82% of SLV’s entire silver holdings) are held in LBMA London vaults.

The auditor for SLV is Inspectorate. Interestingly, the latest Inspectorate letter for SLV, for record date 10 February 2017, does not make a distinction between the 2 Brinks vaults in London and just reports that SLV’s silver is in:

– one vault owned and operated by Brinks, as a sub-custodian for JP Morgan Chase Bank N.A. with 220,066 bars

This would suggest that Inspectorate does not see the need to distinguish between the “Brinks London” vault and the “Brinks London C” vault, presumably because both Brinks vaults are in the same building in the Brinks facility (which is beside Heathrow Airport).

Even though the official custodian for SLV is JP Morgan Chase Bank N.A., London Branch (see original SLV Custodian Agreement filed April 2006 here), since it’s launch in 2006 SLV has at different times used quite a diverse group of sub-custodian vaults as well as at least 3 JP Morgan vaults. For example, over the 3 year period from early 2010 to early 2013, SLV stored silver in the following vaults:

Johnston Matthey, Royston

Brinks London

Brinks London A

Brinks London C

Viamat (now known as Loomis)

JP Morgan London A

JP Morgan London V

JP Morgan New York

Royston is about 50 miles north of central London. The above list is taken from the following chart which is from the ScrewTape Files website.

Given that there are Brinks vaults in London named ‘Brinks London‘, ‘Brinks London A‘, and ‘Brinks London C‘, this would most likely imply that there is or was also a ‘Brinks London B‘ vault, which, for whatever reason, doesn’t show up in any ETF custodian documentation.

The naming convention of the JP Morgan vaults in London as ‘JPM London A‘ and ‘JPM London V‘ is also interesting. SLV silver started being taken out of the ‘JPM London A’ vault in February 2012, and this vault was depleted of 100 million ounces of SLV silver (~ 3100 tonnes) by October 2012 (blue line in above chart). At the same time, the SLV silver inventory in the ‘Brinks London’ vault ramped up by 100 million ounces of SLV silver also between February 2012 and October 2012.

JPM London A could be JP Morgan’s original vault in the City of London. This would then make the JPM London V vault a separate location. My pet theory (pet rock theory) is that the V in the ‘JPM London V’ could refer to Viamat International, which is now known as Loomis. JP Morgan could have outsourced storage of silver to Viamat by ring-fencing some vault space. JP Morgan could then call this space a JP Morgan vault, even though it would be physically within a location managed by one of the security storage / transport providers.

I now think on balance that HSBC probably took the same approach with its gold vault and has it located in a Brinks facility, but that it calls it a HSBC vault. This could also mean that HSBC uses Brinks to store silver, while referring to it as HSBC storage. As to whether HSBC and JP Morgan store gold at the Bank of England while labelling it as a HSBC or JP Morgan storage area is another interesting question, but is beyond the scope of discussion here.

Note, there is also an iShares Silver Bullion Fund known as SVR which uses Scotia Mocatta as a custodian, which as of 29 June held 2,154 silver bars, however, SVR mostly holds its silver bars mostly in Toronto with Scotia, with a small number of silver bars stored with Scotia in New York. SVR therefore does not store any silver bars in London. See latest SVR weight list here.

ETF Securities – 6 ETFs

Keeping track of all the silver-backed ETFs offered by ETF Securities is challenging to say the least, but in the below discussion I’ve tried to devise a system which will make things at least a little clearer.

ETF Securities operates 6 ETFs which hold physical silver bars that are stored in the LBMA precious metals vaulting network in London. Of these 6 ETFS, 3 of them hold silver bars and nothing else. The other 3 ETFs are precious metals baskets which hold ‘physical’ gold, silver, platinum and palladium. Two of these ETFs are domiciled in the UK, 2 are domiciled in Australia, and the other 2 are domiciled in the US. In each of the UK, Australia and the US, ETF Securities offers 1 silver ETF and 1 precious metals basket ETF.

It’s most convenient to refer to the codes of these ETFs when discussing them. The 2 UK domiciled ETFs, with codes PHAG (silver) and PHPM (precious metals basket), are positioned under a company called ETFS Metal Securities Limited (MSL). The 2 ETFs domiciled in Australia, with codes PMAG (silver) and PMPM (precious metals basket), fall under a company called ETFS Metal Securities Australia Limited (MSAL). The final 2, which are US domiciled, are known as SILV (silver) and GLTR (precious metals basket).

ETFS Metal Securities Limited (MSL) – PHAG and PHPM

ETFS Physical Silver (PHAG) has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and trades in USD. It’s NAV is also in USD. The custodian for PHAG is HSBC Bank Plc, with a listed vault location of London. Note: There is also another variant of PHAG called PHSP. It’s the same security as PHAG (same ISIN) but its trades in GBP (and its NAV is calculated in GBP). Its best to ignore PHSP as it’s literally the same fund.

ETFS Physical PM Basket (PHPM) is a precious metals Basket ETF that also holds gold, platinum, and palladium, in addition to silver. The custodian is HSBC Bank Plc with a vault location in London. There is also a GBP variant of PHPM called PHPP. Again, just ignore PHPP in this analysis.

ETFS Metal Securities Limited (MSL) officially reports all of its precious metals holdings in the same report (which it reports on each trading day). Since PHAG and PHPM are part of MSL, PHAG and PHPM silver bar holdings are reported together. According to the MSL weight list, as of 30 June 2017, MSL held 62,427 London Good delivery silver bars containing 60,280,155 troy ounces of silver(1875 tonnes). The individual ETFs within MSL also report their own holdings. However, there is a slight mismatch between dates on the individual fund pages and the date in the MSL spreadsheet with PHAG and PHPM reporting 29 June, while MSL has reported 30 June.

It’s not a big deal though. As of 29 June, PHAG held 58,777,148 troy ozs of silver (1828.2 tonnes) and PHPM held 1,480,037 troy ozs of silver (46 tonnes), which together is 60,257,185 troy ounces of silver (1874.25 tonnes), which is very close to the MSL reported number. Overall, PHAG holds 97.5% of the silver that is held in MSL, and PHPM only holds about 2.5% of the silver held in MSL.

Now, here’s the crux. While MSL uses HSBC Bank Plc in London as custodian for its silver, HSBC also uses Malca Amit London as sub-custodian, and the Malca Amit vault holds more than twice the amount of MSL silver (i.e. predominantly PHAG silver) than the HSBC vault. MSL’s reported silver holding are distributed as per the following table:

Inspectorate is also the independent auditor for the silver held by MSL. According to the latest Inspectorate audit letter, dated 3 March 2017 but referring to an end audit date of 31 December 2016, the silver in MSL was held in the vaults of HSBC Bank plc, London and at the vaults of Malca-AmitLondon.

ETFS Metal Secs. Australia Ltd (MSAL) – PMAG & PMPM

ETFS Physical Silver (PMAG), domiciled in Australia, is an ETF which only holds silver, and holds this silver in London with custodian HSBC Bank plc at a vault location in London. Note: ETF Securities officially refers to PMAG as ETPMAG.

ETFS Physical PM basket (PMPM) is a precious metals Basket ETF that also holds gold, platinum, and palladium, in addition to silver. The custodian of PMPM is HSBC Bank plc with a vault location in London. Note: ETF Securities officially refers to PMPM as ETPMPM.

In a similar way to UK domiciled MSL, MSAL (the ETFS Australian company) reports on all of its precious metals holdings in one daily spreadsheet including the silver in PMAG and PMPM. As of 30 June 2017, MSAL held 2754 silver bars in a HSBC vault in London, containing 2,664,690 troy ounces of silver (82.88 tonnes of silver).

Of the 2,664,690 ounces of silver held by MSAL, over 98%, or 2617,229 ounces, is held by PMAG, with less than 2% held in PMPM (47,362 ounces). The actual figures are 98.22% vs 1.78%. This means that PMAG roughly holds 2705 silver bars, and PMPM holds 49 silver bars.

Inspectorate is, not surprisingly, also the independent auditor for MSAL’s metal holdings, and as per the latest audit letter for record date 31 December 2016, the silver bars audit location is stated as having been “HSBC Bank plc, London“.

The latest silver bar weight list spreadsheet for the ETFS Silver Trust (SIVR), dated 29 June, which is titled “HSBC US Silver Bar List”, states that the SIVR Trust holds 21,437 silver bars containing 20,363,315 troy ozs of silver (633.4 tonnes of silver). There is no mention of SIVR holding any of its silver with a sub-custodian. The latest independent audit report for SIRV, by Inspectorate, for an audit reference date of 31 December 2016, states that the audit took place “at the vault of HSBC Bank plc, London (the “Custodian”)“, where Inspectorate found “20,108 London Good Delivery Silver Bars with a weight of 19,171,492.300 troy ounces.”

However, while 85% of these bars (144.5 tones of silver) are stored in the ‘JP Morgan V‘ vault, 15% of the silver bars (26.5 tonnes of silver) are stored in a ‘Brinks 2‘ vault. So according to GLTR naming convention, as there is a ‘Brinks 2’ vault, presumably when it was first named, there was also a ‘Brinks 1’. ‘Brinks 2’ could possibly be referring to the same location as the ‘Brinks London A’ vault.

Inspectorate is also the independent auditor for the precious metals held by GLTR. In the latest Inspectorate audit letter for GLTR, with an audit reference date of 31 December 2016, Inspectorate states that its audit was only conducted “at the vault of J.P. Morgan Chase N.A, London (the “Custodian”)” where it counted “4,873 London Good Delivery Silver Bars“. This probably means that GLTR’s holdings of silver bars in the ‘Brinks 2’ vault are quite recent, i.e. they have been acquired since 31 December 2016.

SOURCE – Physical Silver P-ETC

A silver-backed ETF offered by the ETF provider ‘SOURCE’, which is named the Physical Silver P-ETC, holds its silver bars in a London vault of custodian JP Morgan. The SOURCE ETF platform was originally established in 2008 as a joint venture between Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch.

The latest silver bar weight list for the Physical Silver P-ETC (dated 23 June) states that it holds 3,129,326 troy ounces of silver (97.34 tonnes of silver). The list does not state an exact bar count, but looking at the weight list, there are about 3,237 silver bars listed.

Inspectorate is also the independent auditor for the Physical silver P-ETC. The latest Inspectorate audit letter, conducted on 4 January 2017, states that at that time, this ETF held 2,048 silver bars containing 1,982,343 troy ounces of silver. This is interesting because about a week ago, this SOURCE Physical silver P-ETC held about 4 million ozs of silver. Now it holds 3.1 million ounces of silver, and at the start of the year it held under 2 million ounces of silver. So the quantity of silver held in this SOURCE silver ETF fluctuates quite dramatically.

Deutsche Bank ETFs

There are 3 ETCs listed on the Exchange Traded Commodity (ETC) section of the Deutsche Asset Management website which hold physical silver in London. These 3 ETCs are as follows:

db Physical Silver ETC

db Physical Silver ETC (EUR)

db Physical Silver Euro hedged ETC

The Factsheets for these 3 Deutsche ETCs all list the custodian as “Deutsche Bank”, but list the sub-custodian as “JP Morgan Chase Bank”. For example, the Factsheet for the db Physical Silver ETCstates

“Custodian/Sub-custodian: Deutsche Bank AG/JP Morgan Chase Bank N.A.”

Shockingly, there do not seem to be any recent independent audit documents for any of these Deutsche ETCs anywhere on the Deutsche Asset Management website. The latest ‘Inventory Audit’ document in the ‘Download Center’ of the website is dated November 2012. That audit document can be viewed here. The old audit document stated that on 25 September 2012, ‘DB ETC Plc’ held 13,314 silver bars containing 13,040,194.3 troy ounces of silver (405.6 tonnes of silver), and that the audit was conducted at ‘Custodian and Location‘ of ‘JP Morgan Chase Bank, N.A. London‘. I have scanned the entire website and there is no sign of any other audit documents or any silver bar weight list.

The initial metal entitlement for units issued in each of these 3 ETCs was 10 troy ounces per unit. The latest units issued figures from Deutsche (dated 22 June 2017) for these ETCs is as follows:

db Physical Silver ETC: 277, 500 units issued

db Physical Silver ETC (EUR): 533,000 units issued

db Physical Silver Euro hedged ETC: 878,000 units issued

Total units issued for silver-backed db ETCs = 1,688,500 units

This would mean that in total, these 3 ETCs would have had an initial metal entitlement of 16,885,000 troy ounces of silver. However, due to what looks like operational fees being offset against the metal in these ETCs (i.e. selling silver to pay fund expenses), the effective metal entitlement for each of the 3 ETCs is now stated on the Deutsche website as being less than 10 troy ounces.

For db Physical Silver ETC, the entitlement is 9.6841 ounces. For db Physical Silver ETC, the entitlement is 9.6930 ounces and for db Physical Silver Euro hedged ETC the metal entitlement is a very low 7.9893 ounces.

Since there are no audit reports and no silver bar weight list for these ETCs, it’s difficult to know if real allocated silver in the form of London Good Delivery silver bars is backing these Deutsche Bank db ETCs, let alone trying to figure how many silver bars are in a JP Morgan vault in London backing these Deutsche products. We can therefore use 462.5 tonne for Deutche but with a caveat that there is no current silver bar weight lists or independent audit documents.

Total ETF Silver held in London LBMA Vaults

Adding up the silver held in the 11 ETFs profiled above yields the following table. In total, the 11 ETFs hold approximately 12,041 tonnes of silver (387.2 million troy ounces) across 4 vault operators. Brinks vaults hold 48% of the total, and JP Morgan vaults hold another 30%. HSBC and Malca Amit hold about 11% each of the remainder.

ETF Silver Holdings – Tonnes, for Silver stored in London LBMA Vaults

In terms of London Good Delivery silver bars, these 11 ETFs hold approximately 400,000 of these silver bars. Since the 3 Deutsche ETFs (ETCs) don’t have an available bar list, I converted the assumed troy ounce holdings to bar totals by assuming each bar held weighs 1000 ozs. Brinks stores over 191,000 of these Good delivery silver bars. That equates to nearly 6,400 pallets with 30 silver bars per pallet. If the pallets were stacked 6 high, and arranged in a square, that would be an area 32 pallets long by about 33 pallets wide. In addition, Brinks may also store silver on behalf of HSBC, or even on behalf of JP Morgan. Who knows?

Number of ETF held Good Delivery Silver Bars stored in London LBMA vaults

BullionVault

According to the latest numbers on the BullionVault website (Daily Audit), BullionVault has 349,939.57 kgs of silver stored in London. That equates to 11,250,557 troy ozs of silver, or 350 tonnes of silver. This silver is stored in the form of London Good Delivery Silver Bars. According to the BullionVault website, BullionVault use Loomis as a custodian for storing silver bars in London:

Those with a BullionVault login can go in and view BullionVault’s latest silver bar weight list which has been generated by Loomis, but BullionVault don’t allow this list to be published externally. Suffice to say, the latest list, dated 11 May, lists 11,544 silver bars which are stored across nearly 400 pallets.

GoldMoney

The GoldMoney website has a real-time audit page which currently states that GoldMoney has 202,057.614 kgs of silver. That equates to 6,496,153 troy ozs of silver, or 202 tonnes of silver stored in London. This silver is also stored with Loomis. At least some of this silver and probably a lot of it is in the form of London Good Delivery silver bars. Without being able to log in to the site properly, it’s not possible to see a bar list.

So between them, BullionVault and GoldMoney have 550 tonnes of silver stored in Loomis vaults in London. My guess is that Loomis (formerly Viamat) store precious metals in a warehouse in Shepperton Business Park, Govett Avenue, Shepperton, a warehouse which is in the corner of the business park, beside the railway track.

Adding this 550 tonnes of silver to the 12040 tonnes of silver held by the 11 ETFs above gives a figure of 12,590 tonnes. Let’s call it 12,600 tonnes. This is then the lower bound on the amount of physical silver in the LBMA vaults in London.

What’s notable and striking about this table is that the ‘Custodian Vaults‘ category for 2016 amounts to a very large 1571.2 million troy ounces of silver (50,440 tonnes), and also the fact that this ‘Custodian vaults’ category is distinct from silver held in ‘Exchanges’ (such as COMEX and TOCOM) and ETPs / ETFs (such as the ETF products discussed above). The ‘Custodian Vaults’ category also does not include ‘Government’ stockpiles or ‘Industry’ inventories. The actual table and the data in the table are sourced from the Thomson Reuters GFMS “World Silver Survey” 2017 edition. As you will see below, this ‘Custodian Category’ refers to holdings of silver which are not reported, but which are stored in custodian vaults, including in the London vaults. This category therefore needs to be examined in the context of the LBMA’s imminent reporting of silver holdings in the LBMA London vaulting system.

You can also see from the above table that this 2016 Custodian Vaults figure of 1571.2 million ozs (50,440 tonnes) grew from a 2008 total of 615.6 million ozs (19,148 tonnes), so in eight years has risen more than 250%.

On pages 37-38 of this GFMS World Silver Survey 2017 (pdf – large file), GFMS makes some very interesting assertions. GFMS starts by defining what it calls Identifiable silver bullion stocks. It states:

‘Identifiable bullion stocks can be split into two categories: unreported GFMS stock estimates that are based on confidential surveys and field research; [and secondly] stocks that are reported.

“Unreported stocks include the lion’s share of our government category and our custodian vault category.”

“Reported inventories are predominantly held in ETPs..but also include some of the government and industry stockpiles.”

However, in the accompanying commentary to the above table, GFMS classifies all ETP, Exchange and Industry holdings as “Reported“, and all Custodian Vaults and Government holdings as “Unreported“. Therefore, it is useful to regroup the 2016 figures from the above table into a Reported category and an Unreported category, as the GFMS commentary then makes more sense. A regrouped table of the 2016 data is as follows, and illustrates that ‘Custodian Vault’ holdings of silver (none of which are reported) account for a whopping 61% of all above ground silver:

GFMS goes on to say that in 2016 “Reported stocks were 36% of identifiable stocks“. Conversely, we can see that ‘Unreported’ silver stocks (Custodian Vaults and Government) were 64% of identifiable stocks.

GFMS says that for 2016 “71% of reported stocks were ETPs“, the rest being Exchange and Industry classifications. Exchanges refers to silver held in warehouses of COMEX (NY), TOCOM (Japan) and the SGE and SHFE (China). COMEX is currently reporting 209 million ouzs of silver in its approved warehouses in New York, of which 172 million ozs in Eligible and 37 million ozs is in the Registered category.

Interesting, but on a side note, GFMS also states in its 2017 silver report that as regards COMEX silver inventories:

“Eligible stocks reported by COMEX contain a portion that is allocated to ETPs”.

“At the end of 2016, the portion of COMEX Eligible stocks that was allocated to ETPs was around 16% of total COMEX eligible stocks.”

This will probably be an eye opener for those interested in COMEX silver warehouse stocks.

Addressing ‘Custodian Vault‘ stocks of silver, GFMS says that Europe’s share of Custodian Vault stocks was 488.7 million ozs (15,201 tonnes) in 2016 and accounted for 31% of total Custodian Vault stocks. Asian ‘Custodian Vault’ stocks of silver were just over 50% of the total with the remainder in North America (Canada and US).

GFMS does not provide a detailed answer, but merely mentions a number of examples, which themselves vary by region. For Asia GFMS says “the bulk of these stocks are located in China, and reflects stocks held in vaults at banks“, and also ” other parts of Asia, such as Singapore, have been increasing in popularity for storage of bars and coins in recent years“, while in India “global bullion banks increasingly seeking this location as a strategic point for silver vaulting in case the need arises.” There are also silver “stocks in Japan”. From a BullionStar perspective, we certainly are aware that there is a lot of silver bullion in vault storage in Singapore, so the GFMS statement is accurate here.

In North America, GFMS attributes the “growth in silver custodian vaulted stocks not allocated to ETPs” to a “drop in coin sales in North America last year“. In the 2016 edition of the World Silver Survey, GFMS said that the growth in custodian vault holdings was partially due to “the reallocation by some North American investors from their ETP holdings” [into custodian holdings].

Turning to Europe, GFMS says that the growth in Custodian vault silver holdings “can be attributed to increased institutional investor interest“. Therefore, according to GFMS, institutional investors in Europe are buying silver and holding real physical silver in Custodian vaults.

With 488.7 million ozs (15,201 tonnes) of silver held in Europe in ‘Custodian vaults’ that is not reported anywhere, at least some of this silver must be held in London, which is one of the world’s largest financial centers and the world’s highest trading volume silver market.

GFMS states:

“Custodian vault stock data excludes ETP Holdings, but it is important to note that most custodians of ETP silver stocks also store silver in vaults that are not allocated to ETPs. the same is true of futures exchange warehouses.”

So how much of this 15,201 tonnes of ‘Custodian Vaults’ silver that is said to be in Europe is actually in London vaults? Apart from London, there would presumably also be significant physical silver holdings vaulted in Switzerland and to a lessor extent in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and maybe Austria etc. So whats’s a suitable percentage for London? Given London’s extensive vaulting network and prominence as a hedge fund and institutional investment centre, a 40-50% share of the European ‘custodian vault’ silver holdings would not be unrealistic, with the other big percentage probably vaulted in Switzerland. This would therefore put previously ‘Unreported’ silver holdings in the London vaults at between 6080 tonnes and 7600 tonnes (or an additional 182,000 to 230,000 Good Delivery Silver bars).

Adding this range of 6080 – 7600 tonnes to the 12,040 tonne figure that the 11 ETFs above hold, gives a total figure of 18,120 – 19,640 tonnes of silver stored in the LBMA vaults in London (545,000 – 585,000 Good Delivery silver bars).

Note, BullionVault and GoldMoney silver is technically part of the ‘Custodian Vault’ figure, so can’t be counted twice.

ps: In its 2017 World Silver Survey, GFMS also stated that in 2016, ETPs (ETFs) held 664.8 million ounces of silver “with 75% of the total custodian vaulted stocks [that were] allocated to ETPs held in Europe and 24% in North America. Asia makes up the balance of less than 1%.“. This would mean that as of the date of the GFMS calculation for 2016, 498.6 million ounces of ETF silver was vaulted in Europe.

Above, I have accounted for 387.1 million ounces of silver that is currently stored in London on behalf of 11 ETFs. There are also 3 Swiss Silver ETFs which store their silver in Switzerland. These are ZKB (currently with 74.9 million ozs), Julius Baer (currently with 13.7 million ozs) and UBS (currently with 5.89 million ozs), giving a total of 94.49 million ozs of silver for these 3 Swiss based platforms. Therefore, between London vaults and vaults in Switzerland, there are currently 14 ETFs that together hold 481.6 million ounces of vaulted silver (14,980 tonnes of vaulted silver).

Conclusion

When the LBMA finally manages to publish its first report on the silver and gold stored in the LBMA vaults in London in the coming days, we will have a clearer picture of how much physical silver is actually in these mysterious and opaque vaults.

A lower bound based on ETF holdings and BullionVault and GoldMoney holdings would be about 12600 tonnes of silver. A higher bound that also reflects ‘Custodian Vault’ holdings could be in the region of 18120 – 19640 tonnes of silver. There would probably also be some LBMA bullion bank float, which may or may not be included in ‘Custodian Vault’ figures, that could push the silver total to over 20,000 tonnes or more.

The LBMA perennially claims that it wants to bring transparency to the London precious metals market. This has been a very hollow mantra for a long time now. However, while some of the LBMA members may want this transparency, others, possibly some of the powerful bullion banks or their clients, certainly don’t want transparency. Take a case in point. At the Asia Pacific Precious Metals Conference (APPMC) in Singapore in early June, the LBMA CEO in a speech to the conference talked about the difficulty of even getting a press release out about the upcoming publication of gold and silver vault holdings data. She said (fast forward to 8:37 in the below video):

“It was actually a huge achievement just to get the press release out.”

For what is supposed to be a mature and efficient financial marketplace, this is a truly bizarre occurrence, and it must be pretty obvious that some of the vested interests in the London gold and silver markets needed to be dragged kicking and screaming over the finish line as regards being in any way open about how much gold and silver is actually in these LBMA London vaults.

But now, according to the LBMA CEO in the same part of her speech, even so-called “credible investors” (as opposed to uncredible investors?) also “find it a little odd that as a marketplace, there’s no data“, which may explain the vampires within the LBMA being dragged into the daylight.

Hopefully with the above analysis and the upcoming aggregated LBMA silver vaulting numbers, these “credible investors” (and the hundreds of millions of other silver investors around the world) will now be less in the dark about the amount of silver in the London LBMA vaulting network, and will now have better information with which to make investment decisions when buying silver and selling silver.

This new gold vault data was first released in early April 2017 and covers gold bar holdings at the Bank of England for every month-end for the last 6 years. Going forward, the Bank will publish updates to this dataset every month, on a 3-month lagged basis.

The move by the Bank of England to publish this data was first reported by the Financial Times in February and was supposedly part of a broader gold vault reporting initiative which was to include vault holdings for all 7 of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) commercial precious vaults in London. These commercial vaults are run by HSBC, JP Morgan, Brinks (on behalf of itself and ICBC Standard), Malca Amit, Loomis and G4S. While the Bank of England had single-handedly gone ahead with its side of the reporting initiative, the precious metals vault holdings data from the LBMA was conspicuously absent when the Bank of England made its move. As I wrote in my article last week:

“The London Bullion Market Association was also expected to publish gold vault holdings data for the commercial gold vaults in London, but as of now, this data has not been published, for reasons unknown.”

“While the Bank of England has now followed through with its promise to publish its gold vault holdings, the LBMA has still not published gold vault data for the commercial gold vault providers, i.e. its members HSBC, JP Morgan, ICBC Standard Bank, Brinks, Malca Amit, Loomis and G4S. Where is this data, why is there a delay, and why has it not yet been published?”

However, as if by magic, the LBMA has now just issued a press release titled “LBMA to publish Precious Metal holdings in London vaults”. Coincidence, perhaps. But whatever the case, the LBMA development is timely, and the press release, which is actually a combined press release from the LBMA and one of its alter egos, London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL), makes interesting reading, but unfortunately at the same time is still quite vague, and appears to suggest that some of the vault operators in question have been dragged kicking and screaming to the start line.

Summer of 2017

The statement from the LBMA reveals that:

“from summer 2017 the LBMA will be publishing the gold and silver physical precious metals holdings of the London vaults, with the platinum and palladium holdings to be published at a later date”

The statement also clarifies that “the data only includes physical metal held within the London environs” and that it will cover “aggregate physical holdings”.

Given that the LBMA and Bank of England work very closely, its disappointing and bizarre that the LBMA didn’t coordinate the vault data release at the same time as the Bank of England, because, at the end of the day, this is just some simple holdings data we are talking about, and all the vaults concerned know precisely how much precious metal they are holding at any given moment.

As a reminder, the Bank of England was established by the LBMA in 1987, the Bank of England is an observer on the LBMA Management Committee, and the former head of the Bank of England Foreign exchange Division, Paul Fisher, is the recently appointed ‘independent‘ chairman of the LBMA Management ‘Board’ (formerly known as the LBMA Management Committee). See “Blood Brothers: The Bank of England and the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA)” for more details.

Representatives of the two large commercial vault operators in London, HSBC and JP Morgan, also sit on the LBMA Board. Additionally, representatives of the vault operators HSBC, JP Morgan, Brinks and ICBC Standard Bank also sit on the LBMA Physical Committee and all of the vault operators are represented on the LBMA’s Vault Managers Working Party.

The reference to ‘aggregate physical holdings‘ in the press releaseis also potentially disappointing as it seems to imply that the LBMA will not break out its vault reporting into how much gold and silver is held by each of the 7 individual vault operators in and around London, but might only publish one combined figure each month end.

A reporting format in which each vault/operator is listed alongside the quantity (tonnes or thousands of ounces) of gold and silver held by that vault operator would be ideal.For example, something along the lines of:

Quantity per vault is the approach taken in the daily precious metals vault reports that COMEX releases on its approved vault facilities in and around New York, as per an example for gold here. HSBC, JP Morgan, Brinks and Malca Amit submit inventory levels to COMEX for that report. Likewise, HSBC, JP Morgan, Brinks and Loomis submit inventory levels in New York to ICE futures for its version of the gold futures inventory report.

Given that the individual vault operators based in New York report precious metals inventory to COMEX and ICE, is it too much to expect that many of the same vault operators cannot do likewise for their London vault facilities?

It remains to be seen which date ‘summer 2017” refers to. This seems like a bizarre non-committal cop out by the LBMA not to have announced a definitive date for beginning to report vault data. Summer 2017 could mean anything. Assuming they are talking about the northern hemisphere, summer could mean anywhere from May to August or beyond.

If the LBMA data is on a 3-month lagged basis in the same way that the Bank of England data is, the first tranche of LBMA vault data could neatly be released after 30 June and would cover month-end March 2017. As a reminder, the Bank of England gold vault data shows:

“the weight of gold held in custody on the last business day of each month. We publish the data with a minimum three-month lag”

Why the vault data on a platinum and palladium can’t be published at the same time as the gold and silver data is also puzzling, because the London Platinum and Palladium Market (LPPM) is now officially integrated into the LBMA following a change in the LBMA’s governance and legal structure in 2016, so both sets of data are now under the remit of essentially the same Association.

It also remains to be seen whether the LBMA data will have a 6-year historical look-back as the Bank of England data does, or whether it will just begin with a one month-end snapshot? For consistency with the Bank of England data, the LBMA vault data should ideally cover the same time period, i.e. every month beginning at January 2011. In short the LBMA press release is lacking quite a lot of detail and unfortunately invites guesswork.

The Importance of the Vault Data

Turning quickly to why this gold vault data is important. Simply put, at the moment there is little official visibility into how much physical gold is stored in the London Gold Market, and how much of this gold is available as “liquidity” to back up the market’s huge fractional reserve gold trading volumes. Albeit for silver.

In my coverage on 28 April of the Bank of England data release, I had phrased the relationship between physical gold and gold trading in the London market as follows:

“this physical gold stored at both the Bank of England vaults and the commercial London vaults underpins the gargantuan trading volumes of the London Gold Market”

Interestingly and somewhat synchronistically, in its 8 May press release one week later, the LBMA uses very similar phraseology, as well as the identical verb ‘underpins’, when it states that:

“the physical holdings of precious metals held in the London vaults underpins the gross daily trading and net clearing in London”

Another coincidence perhaps, but the LBMA is now also saying that the physical gold bars which they will report on starting in summer 2017, and which the Bank of England has just started reporting on, literally ‘underpin’ or support the massive volume of gold trading in the London Gold Market.

“Net clearing” refers to London clearing volumes for gold and silver that are processed through the LMPCL’s clearing system AURUM, and that are published each month by the LBMA, a recent example of which, covering month-end March 2017, can be seen here. In March 2017, an average of 18.1 million ounces of gold (563 tonnes) and 203.2 million ounces of silver (6320 tonnes) were clearedeach trading day.

Since trade clearing nets out actual trading volumes, these clearing figures need to be grossed up to reveal the true trading figures. Using a 10:1 ratio of trading to clearing, which is a realistic multiplier as discussed here, this would be equivalent to 5630 tonnes of gold and 62,200 tonnes of silver traded each day in the London wholesale gold and silver markets. On an annualised basis, for gold, this would imply that the equivalent of over 1.4 million tonnes of gold are traded per year in the London gold market, quite an achievement, seeing that less than 200,000 tonnes of gold is said to have ever been mined throughout history, and half of this total is held in the form of jewellery.

The LBMA press release goes on to say that:

“Publication of aggregate physical holdings is the first step in reporting for the London Precious Metals Market.

The next step is Trade Reporting.

The collection of trade data will add transparency to the market and provide gross turnover for the Loco London market. Previously gross turnover had been calculated from one-off surveys or estimated from the clearing statistics.“

With the LBMA vault reporting being the first step, but only coming out in the summer of 2017, its anyone’s guess as to when LBMA trade reporting will be coming out, a project which has been bandied about in the financial media and by the LBMA for nearly 3 years now, but which must take the record as the slowest fintech formulation and release in the history of London financial markets, ever.

The Bank of England’s latest physical gold holdings for January month-end 2017 is only in the region of 5100 tonnes of gold bars. Furthermore, since the LBMA say that there are only about 6500 tonnes of gold in the entire London market, the LBMA commercial gold vaults in London have to hold far less gold than the Bank of England. Add to this the fact that the gold in the commercial vaults is mostly held on behalf of gold-backed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Given the above, it becomes increasingly clear than when the LBMA does decide to release gold vault holdings figures sometime in summer 2017, whatever figure(s) is released, will most likely confirm that there is very little gold in the London market which is not claimed to be owned by either a central bank or a gold-backed ETF. It will also provide a field day for all sorts of theories and calculations about the true ratio of gold trading volumes to gold bar vault holdings, and how much of this gold is allocated and earmarked, and how much can be considered a combined bullions banks’ float.

A Quick Calculation

Its possible to go someway towards estimating a minimum figure for how much gold to expect the LBMA to report on the commercial vaults when it begins vaults reporting this summer. The same exercise could be conducted for silver but is beyond the scope of this analysis. For gold, when such a figure is calculated and added to the amount of gold in the Bank of England vaults, it gives a grand total of how much gold is in the combined LBMA and Bank of England vaults in London.

A large number of high-profile gold-backed ETFs store their gold bars in LBMA vaults in London, mainly in the vaults of HSBC and JP Morgan. The HSBC vault in London holds gold on behalf of the SPDR Gold Trust (currently 853 tonnes) and ETF Securities (about 215 tonnes). The JP Morgan gold vault in London holds gold on behalf of ETFs run by iShares (about 210 tonnes in London), Deutsche Bank (95 tonnes), and Source (100 tonnes). An ABSA ETF holds about 36 tonnes of gold with Brinks in London. In total, these ETFs represent about 1510 tonnes of gold. For the approach used to calculate this type of figure for gold-backed ETFs, please see “Tracking the gold held in London: An update on ETF and BoE holdings“.

ETF gold holdings (most of which are stored in London) have been relatively static since mid March 2017. See chart below. Therefore if the LBMA starts reporting vault gold holdings for a month-end date such as month-end March 2017, it would probably reflect about 1500 tonnes of ETF gold, mostly held by at HSBC and JP Morgan vaults in London. This is assuming that some of the ETF gold is not held in sub-custody at the Bank of England vaults.

Until the LBMA starts its vault reporting, its unclear how much other gold is in the commercial vaults in London above and beyond the ETF holdings. However, non-monetary gold regularly flows in and out of the London Gold Market from gold trade with countries such as Switzerland. While March 2016 to October 2016 was a period in which the UK was a strong net importer of non-monetary gold from Switzerland, since then the UK has been a net exporter of gold to Switzerland, and has exported 325 tonnes of gold from October 2016 to end of March 2017. Therefore, whatever data the LBMA starts reporting, it logically should reflect the renewed outflow of gold from London to places like Switzerland and would tend to suggest that whatever excess bullion bank float gold is in the London commercial vaults, it is less than it would have been in the absence of these renewed outflows.

“6,500 tonnes of gold held in London vaults, of which about three quarters is stored in the Bank of England”

While this web page text is probably slightly out of date, a literal interpretation would imply that 4875 tonnes of gold are in the Bank of England (which is not too far from the actual figure) and that 1625 tonnes are in the commercial vaults (which would mean that very little non-ETF gold is in the commercial vaults).

The Bank of England claims to have about 72 central bank customers with gold accounts, For month-end January 2017, the Bank of England is reporting that there was approximately 5100 tonnes of gold in its vaults. At least 3800 tonnes of this gold is claimed to be owned by 34 known central banks. See “Central Bank Gold at the Bank of England” for more details. That would leave about 1300 tonnes of gold at the Bank of England owned by a selection of other central banks and bullion banks. As to how much gold the bullion banks hold at the Bank of England is not clear, but since central bank gold holdings are relatively static (at least when excluding gold lending), then most of the month-to-month movements in Bank of England gold vault holdings are most likely due to bullion bank activity.

As to how easily bullion bank gold holdings at the Bank of England can switch to or be transported to the vaults of the commercial vault operators in London is also unclear, as logistics is a secretive area of the London Gold Market.

So with (1500 ETF tonnes of gold + X) in the commercial vaults, and 5100 tonnes of gold in the Bank of England vaults, this gives a grand total of 6600 tonnes of gold + X in all the vaults of the London as of early 2017. X could be 400 tonnes, it could be 1400 tonnes, or it could be any other figure of similar magnitude. My guess is that there is not that much gold in the commercial vaults above and beyond whats in the gold-backed ETFs. Maybe a few hundred tonnes or so. However, we will have to wait until the dog days of ‘summer’ in London to know this definitively.

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An article in February on BullionStar’s website titled “A Chink of Light into London’s Gold Vaults?” discussed an upcoming development in the London Gold Market, namely that both the Bank of England (BoE) and the commercial gold vault providers in London planned to begin publishing regular data on the quantity of physical gold actually stored in their gold vaults.

Critically, this physical gold stored at both the Bank of England vaults and the commercial London vaults underpins the gargantuan trading volumes of the London Gold Market and the same market’s ‘liquidity’. Therefore, a new vault holdings dataset would be a very useful reference point for relating to London’s ‘gold’ trading volumes as well as relating to data such as the level and direction of the gold price, the volume of gold held in gold-backed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), UK gold import and export statistics, and Swiss and Hong Kong gold imports and exports.

The impending publication of this new gold vault data was initially signalled by two sources. Firstly, in early February, the Financial Times (FT) wrote a story claiming that the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) planned to begin publishing 3 month lagged physical gold storage data for the entire London gold vaulting network, that would, according to the FT:

“show gold bars held by the BoE, the gold clearing banks, and those [vaults] operated by the security companies such as Brink’s, which are also members of the LBMA.”

The “gold clearing banks” are the bullion bank members of London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL), namely, HSBC, JP Morgan, ICBC Standard Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia – Scotia Mocatta, and UBS. HSBC and JP Morgan operate precious metals vaults in London. See profile of JP Morgan’s London vault and a discussion of the HSBC vault . ICBC Standard Bank also maintains a vault in London which is operated on its behalf by Brinks.

The second publication to address the new gold vault data was the World Gold Council. On 16 February, addressing just the Bank of England vaults, the World Gold Council wrote in its Gold Investor publication that:

“The Bank of England is, for the first time, publishing monthly data revealing the amount of gold it holds on behalf of other central banks.”

“The data reveals the total weight of gold held within the Bank of England’s vaults and includes five years of historical data.”

While I had been told by a media source that the London vault data would be released in the first quarter of 2017, at the time of writing, there is still no sign of any LBMA vault holdings data covering the commercial vault operators in London. However, the Bank of England has now gone ahead and independently released its own numbers covering gold held in the Bank of England gold vaults. These gold vaults, of which there are between 8 – 10 (the number fluctuates), are located on the 2 basement levels of the Bank of England headquarters in the City of London.

In an updated web page on the Bank of England’s website simply titled ‘Gold’, the Bank of England has now added a section titled ‘Bank of England Gold Holdings’ and has uploaded an Excel spreadsheet which contains end-of-month gold holdings data covering every month for a 6-year period up to the end of December 2016, i.e. every month from January 2011 to December 2016 i.e. 72 months.

Bank of England ‘show’ gold vault

According to the Bank of England, the data in the spreadsheet shows:

“the weight of gold held in custody on the last business day of each month. We publish the data with a minimum three-month lag.

Values are given in thousands of fine troy ounces. Fine troy ounces denote only the pure gold content of a bar.

We only accept bars which comply with London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) London Good Delivery (LGD) standards. LGD bars must meet a certain minimum fineness and weight. A typical gold bar weighs around 400 oz.

Historic data on our gold custody holdings can be found in our Annual Report.”

Prior to this spreadsheet becoming available, the Bank of England only ever divulged gold vault quantity data once a year within its Annual Report, for year-end reporting date end of February.

You will appreciate that the new spreadsheet, having data for every month of the year, and for 72 months of data retrospectively, conveys a lot more information than having just one snapshot number per year in an annual report. Therefore, the Bank of England has gone some way towards improving transparency in this area.

Before looking at the new data and what it reveals, it’s important to know what this data relates to. The Bank of England provides gold custody (storage) services to both central banks and a number of large commercial banks. Large commercial banks which trade gold are commonly known as bullion banks, and are mostly the high-profile and well-known investment banks.

On its gold web page, the Bank highlights this fact – that it provides gold custody service to both central banks and commercial banks:

“We provide safe custody for the United Kingdom’s gold reserves, and for other central banks. This supports financial stability by providing central banks with access to the liquidity of the London gold market.

We also provide gold accounts to certain commercial firms that facilitate access for central banks to the London gold market.”

In the London Gold Market, the word “liquidity” is a euphemism for gold loans, gold swaps, and gold trading including gold sales. This reference to central banks accessing the London Gold Market as being in some way supportive of ‘financial stability’ is also an eye-opener, since reading between the lines, the Bank of England is conceding that by accessing the London Gold Market’s “liquidity” via bullion banks, these central bank clients are either contributing to direct stabilisation of the gold price in some shape or form, or else are using their gold operations to raise foreign currencies for exchange rate intervention and/or system liquidity. But both routes are aiming at the same outcome. i.e. stability of the financial system.

At the end of the day, the gold price has always been a barometer that central banks strive to keep a lid on and which they aim to stabilise or smoothen the gyrations of, given that the alternative – a freely formed and unmanipulated gold price – would thwart their coordination of fiat currency exchange rates, interest rates and inflation targets.

Interestingly, in addition to the new spreadsheet of gold holdings data, the Bank of England gold web page now includes a link to a new 1 page ‘Gold Policy’ pdf document, which, looking at the pdf document’s properties, was only created on 30 January 2017. This document therefore also looks like it was written in conjunction with the new gold vault data rollout.

The notion of central banks accessing the liquidity of the London Gold Market via bullion banks is further developed in this Gold Policy document also. The document is quite short and merely states the following:

“GOLD ACCOUNTS AT THE BANK OF ENGLAND

1. The Bank primarily offers gold accounts to central bank customers. This is to support financial stability by providing central banks with secure custody for their gold reserves and access to the liquidity of the London gold market (particularly given the Bank’s location).

2. To facilitate, either directly or indirectly, access for central banks to the liquidity of the London gold market, the Bank will also consider providing gold accounts to certain commercial firms. In deciding whether to provide an account, the Bank will be guided by the following criteria.

a. The firm’s day to day activities must support the liquidity of the London gold market.b. Specifically, the Bank may have regard to a number of factors including but not limited to: evidence of active or prospective trading with a central bank customer; or whether the firm has committed to honour buy and sell prices.

3. Access to a gold account remains at the sole discretion of the Bank.

4. The Bank will review this policy periodically.”

The Vault Data

Nick Laird has now produced a series of impressive charts of this new Bank of England data on his website GoldChartsRUS. Plotting the series of 72 months of gold holdings data over January 2011 to December 2016 yields the below chart.

On average, the Bank’s vaults held 5457 tonnes of gold over this 6 year period. The minimum amount of gold held was 4693 tonnes at the end of March 2016, while the maximum quantity of gold held was 6250 tonnes at the end of February 2013.

The overall trend in the chart is downward with a huge outflow of gold bars from the bank’s vaults from the end of February 2013 to the end of March 2016.

As of January 2011, the BoE held just over 5500 tonnes of gold bars in its vaults. Gold holdings rose until the end of August 2011 and peaked at nearly 5900 tonnes before falling to 5600 tonnes at year-end 2011. Overall in 2011, the holdings fluctuated in a 400 tonne range, trending up during the first 8 months, and down during the latter 4 months.

This downtrend only lasted until January 2012, at which point BoE gold holdings totalled about 5450 tonnes. For the remainder of 2012, BoE gold under custody rose sharply, reaching 6200 tonnes by the end of 2012, a level near the ultimate peak in this 6 year chart. The year 2012 was therefore a year of accumulation of gold bars at the Bank during which 750 tonnes were added.

The overall maximum peak was actually 6250 tonnes at the end of February 2013, after which a sustained downtrend evolved through the remainder of 2013. By December 2013, gold under custody at the Bank of England had fallen to 5670 tonnes, creating an overall outflow of 580 tonnes of gold bars during 2013.

The outflow of gold continued during 2014 with another 470 tonnes flowing out of the Bank, leading to end of year 2014 gold holdings of just 5200 tonnes. The outflow also continued all through 2015 with only 4780 tonnes of gold in custody at the end of December 2015. The Bank therefore lost another 440 tonnes of gold bars in 2015.

Overall, that makes an outflow of 1490 tonnes of gold from the Bank’s vaults over the 3 years from 2013 to 2015 inclusive. This downtrend lingered for 3 more months, with another 80 tonnes lost, which brought the end of March 2016 and end of April 2016 figures to a level of about 4700 tonnes, which is the overall trough on the chart. It also means that there was a net outflow of 1570 tonnes of gold bars from the Bank’s vaults from the end of February 2013 to the end of March / April 2016.

A new uptrend / inflow trend began at the end of April 2016 and continued to the end of November 2016, where gold custody holdings peaked again at about 5123 tonnes before levelling off at the end of December 2016 at 5102 tonnes. Therefore, from the end of April 2016 to the end of December 2016, the Bank of England vaults added 400 tonnes of gold bars.

The gold holdings of the vast majority of central banks have remained stagnant over the 2011 – 2016 period, the exceptions being the central banks of China and Russia. But Russia buys domestically mined gold and stores it in vaults in Moscow and St Petersburg, so this would not affect gold holdings at the Bank of England. China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), is known to buy its gold on the international market, including the London Gold Market. It then monetizes this gold (classifies it as monetary gold), and airlifts it back to China. But these Chinese purchases don’t show up in UK gold exports because monetary gold is exempt from trade statistics reporting. However, if China was surreptitiously buying gold from other central banks with gold accounts at the Bank of England or buying gold from bullion banks with gold accounts at the BoE, then some of the gold outflows from the BoE could be PBoC gold purchases. But without central bank specific data, its difficult to know.

But what is probably true is that the fluctuations in the quantity of gold stored in the Bank of England vaults are more do to with the gold holdings of bullion banks and less to do with the gold holdings of central banks, for the simple reason that central bank gold holdings are relatively static, or the least the central banks claim that their gold holdings are static. This does not take into account the gold lending market which the central banks and bullion banks go to great lengths to keep secret.

There is also a noticeable positive correlation between the movement of the US Dollar gold price and the inflows/outflows of gold to and from the Bank of England vaults, as the above chart demonstrates.

Bullion Bank gold accounts at the BoE

One basic piece of information that the Bank of England’s new vault storage data lacks is an indication of how many central banks and how many commercial banks are represented in the data.

In its first quarterly report from Q1 2014,the Bank of England states that 72 central banks operate gold accounts at the bank of England, a figure which includes a few official sector organisations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Central Bank (ECB), and Bank for International Settlements (BIS). This number would not have changed much in the meantime, so we can assume that the gold holdings of about 72 central banks are represented in the new data. But the number of commercial banks holding gold accounts at the Bank of England is less clear-cut.

The 5 gold clearing banks of the LPMCL all hold gold accounts at the Bank of England. Why? Because it says so on the LPMCL website:

“Each member of LPMCL has vaulting facilities under its control for the storage of gold and/or silver, plus in the case of gold bullion, account facilities at the Bank of England, which have contributed to the development of bullion clearing in London.”

The LPMCL also states that its clearing statistics include:

“Transfers over LPMCL Clearing Members’ accounts at the Bank of England.”

The Bank of England’s reference in its new ‘Gold Policy’ document to commercial banks needing to be “committed to honour buy and sell prices” is a reference to market makersand would cover all 13 LBMA market makers in gold, which are the 5 LPMCL members and also BNP Paribas, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Société Générale, Standard Chartered Bank, Toronto-Dominion Bank. But there are also gold trading banks that make a market in gold which are not officially LBMA market makers, such as Commerzbank in Luxembourg which claims to be one of the biggest bullion banks in the world.

So I would say that lots of other bullion banks (of which there about 40 in total) have gold accounts at the Bank of England in addition to the 13 official LBMA market makers.

More fundamentally, any bullion bank that is engaged in gold lending with central banks (the central banks being the lenders and the bullion banks being the borrowers) would need a gold account at the Bank of England. I counted 28 bullion banks that have been involved with borrowing the gold of just one central bank, the central bank of Bolivia (Banco Central de Bolivia – BCB) between 1998 and 2016. Some of these banks have since merged or exited precious metals trading, but still, it gives an estimate of the number of bullion banks that have been involved in the gold lending market. The Banco Central de Bolivia’s gold lending activities will be covered in some forthcoming blog posts.

Bullion banks that are Authorised Participants (APs) for gold-backed ETFs such as the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) or iShares Gold Trust (IAU) may also have gold accounts at the Bank of England. I say may have, because in practice the APs leave it up to the custodians such as HSBC and JP Morgan to allocate or deallocate the actual physical gold flowing in and out of the ETFs, but HSBC on occasion uses the Bank of England as a sub-custodian for GLD gold (see “SPDR Gold Trust gold bars at the Bank of England vaults” for details), so if some of the APs want to keep their own stash of allocated physical gold in relation to ETF trading, it would make sense for them to have a gold account at the Bank of England.

As to how much gold the GLD stores at the Bank of England and how regularly this occurs is still opaque because the SEC does not require the GLD filings to be very granular, however there is a very close correlation between inflows and outflows from GLD and the inflows and outflows from the Bank of England vaults, as the following chart clearly illustrates.

Gold held in the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) and custody gold held at the Bank of England: January 2011 – December 2016. Source:www.GoldChartsRUS.com

As gold was extracted from the GLD beginning in late 2012, a few months later the Bank of England gold holdings began to shrink also. This trend continues all the way through 2013, 2014 and 2015. Then as the amount of gold began to increase in the GLD at the end of 2015, the gold holdings at the Bank of England began to increase also. Could this be bullion banks extracting gold from the GLD, then holding this gold at the Bank of England and then subsequently exporting it out of the UK?

Some of it could, but UK gold net exports figures suggest that gold was withdrawn from both the Bank of England vaults and from the ETF gold stored at commercial gold vaults (run by HSBC and JP Morgan), after which it was exported.

Custody gold held at the Bank of England and UK gold imports and exports: January 2011 – December 2016. Source:www.GoldChartsRUS.com

Looking at the above chart which plots Bank of England gold holdings and UK gold imports and exports (and net exports) is revealing. As Nick Laird points out in this chart, over the 2013 to 2015 period during which the Bank of England gold holdings fell by 1500 tonnes, there were UK net gold export flows of 2500 tonnes, i.e. 2500 tonnes of gold flowed out of London gold vaults, so an additional 1000 tonnes had to come from somewhere apart from the Bank of England vaults.

Spot Checks

The new monthly vault holdings data from the Bank of England can now also be compared to the amount of gold reported by the Bank of England in its annual reports. The figures the Bank reports in the annual report are as of the end of February. These figures are only reported in Pounds Sterling, not quantities, so they need to be either converted to USD and divided by the USD LBMA Gold Price on the last day of February, or else just divided by the GBP LBMA Gold Price on that day.

For end of February 2015, the calculated total for gold held at the Bank of England (based on the annual report) came out at 5,134 tonnes. Now the Bank of England data says 5126 tonnes which is very close to the calculation. For February 2016, the calculation came out at 4725 tonnes. The new Bank of England data now says 4730 tonnes, so that’s pretty close also.

Conclusion

This new Bank of England data is welcome and the Bank of England has taken a step towards greater transparency. However, it would be more useful if the Bank published a breakdown of how much of this gold is held by central banks and how much is held by bullion banks, along with the number of central banks and number of bullion banks that the data represents. Two distinct sets of data would be ideal, one for central bank custody holdings and the other for bullion bank custody holdings. The Bank most likely would never publish two sets of data as it would show bullion bank gold storage activity for the whole world to see.

While the Bank of England has now followed through with its promise to publish its gold vault holdings, the LBMA has still not published gold vault data for the commercial gold vault providers, i.e. its members HSBC, JP Morgan, ICBC Standard Bank, Brinks, Malca Amit, Loomis and G4S. Where is this data, why is there a delay, and why has it not yet been published?

As a reminder, the Financial Times article in early February said that the LBMA would publish gold vault holdings data that would:

“show gold bars held by the BoE, the gold clearing banks, and those [vaults] operated by the security companies such as Brink’s”

The Financial Times article also said that:

“HSBC and JPMorgan, London’s biggest bullion banks, are backing the initiatives by the LBMA to improve transparency.”

With the gold holdings data on the other London vaults still not published, it begs the question, has there been a change of mind by HSBC and JP Morgan, two of the LBMA’s largest and most powerful members?

“Reputedly [the Bank of England vaults are] the second largest vault in the world with approximately 500,000 gold bars held in safe custody on behalf of its customers, including LBMA members, central banks, international financial institutions and Her Majesty’s Treasury.”

A holding of 500,000 Good Delivery gold bars is equal to 6250 tonnes. However, according to the Bank of England’s own figure for month end December 2016, the Bank of England only holds 5100 tonnes of gold in custody (408,000 Good delivery gold bars). Therefore, the LBMA is overstating the Bank of England’s holdings by 1150 tonnes, unless, and it’s unlikely, that the BoE vaults have seen huge gold bar inflows in the last 4 months.

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The article “From Good Delivery bars to Kilobars – The Swiss Refineries, the GFMS data, and the LBMA” examined the mountain of evidence concerning the known Swiss conversion of Good Delivery bars into kilobars for export to gold markets in the East. As a further step in this process, it’s worth taking a look at the substantial evidence of these kilobars either being accumulated, or passing through, vault locations in markets such as the Hong Kong gold market. It’s also worth looking at where these gold vaults in Hong are actually located.

Kilobar Accumulation in Hong Kong

In March 2015, the CME Group launched a Hong Kong based gold kilo futures contract. This contract is physically deliverable at various Hong Kong precious metals vaults. Note that most of the trades on this contract are executed OTC through CME appointed market makers, so will not appear as exchange trading volume in CME market data statistics. CME announced a market maker program on 8 January 2015 whereby “Participants must quote continuous two-sided markets in the applicable Product, at predetermined average bid/ask spreads and minimum quote sizes”, the product being the “Gold Kilo (“GCK”) futures that are traded on the CME Globex Platform.” On 16 April 2015, CME modified its market maker program, by increasing the number of designated market makers from 10 to 12.

CME Vault Inventory Analysis

As part of the 2014 pre-launch operational procedures for the CME’s Hong Kong gold contract, the CME analysed the vault inventories of the storage companies that were interested in having their vaults approved, and the CME then submitted various documents to its commodities regulator, the US CFTC.

On 11 September 2014, Brink’s Global Services, USA, Inc, HKIA Precious Metals Depository Limited, and Via Mat Management AG all applied for vault approval for the CME Hong Kong kilobar gold contract (see official CME notice here). Note that HKIA is an abbreviation for Hong Kong International Airport. Three months later on 11 December 2014, CME issued a notice that Malca-Amit had also applied for vault approval for the Hong Kong kilobar gold futures contract (see official CME notice here). On 6 January 2015, CME approved both the Brinks and the Malca-Amit vault applications for the kilobar contract (see exhibits 1 and 2 here), but the HKIA and Via Mat applications, at that time, remained unprocessed (or unapproved).

As part of the CME/CFTC due diligence on the Brinks and Malca-Amit vaults and the estimation of position limits for the gold kilo contract, Brinks and Malca-Amit provided historic monthly gold bar volumes data to CME sometime in the fourth quarter of 2014 so that CME could gauge eligible (kilobar) inventory levels (or deliverable supply) .

On 8 January 2015, the CME published a file containing Brinks and Malca-Amit historical bar volumes up to November 2014. What the file shows, in the ‘Analysis of Deliverable Supply‘ section (pages 16-19 of the pdf) is that both Malca-Amit Hong Kong vault and Brinks Hong Kong vault were storing increasingly large quantities of gold kilobars throughout the second half of 2013 and into 2014, with Malca-Amit storing up to 110 tonnes of kilobars in November 2014, the final month of the dataset.

At the same point in time, Brinks in Hong Kong was storing 49,000 kilobars, i.e. 49 tonnes. The Malca-Amit monthly data sequence commenced in June 2012, while the Brinks data was provided from January 2011 onwards. So with these two datasets we have a window of transparency into the Brinks and Malca-Amit Hong Kong kilobar holdings for the years 2011 – 2014.

As the CME report stated:

“Malca-Amit has provided average monthly inventory levels of gold kilo bars from June 2012 through November 2014. Brinks, Inc. has provided average monthly inventory levels of gold kilo bars from January 2011 through November 2014.”

Since this data is average monthly inventory, if there were regular arrivals and withdrawals of kilobar stocks throughout the monthly periods being measured (as can be seen with the Brinks Hong Kong vault stocks after the CME contract was launched in March 2015), then the average data could have, to some extent, understated the daily activity of kilobar movements in these vaults.

In its analysis the CME reported that:

“Gold kilo bar inventory at Malca Amit are all minimum .9999 fineness. Brinks, Inc. inventory consists of gold kilo bars of both .9999 and .995 fineness. Of total inventory at Brinks, Inc., the gold kilo bars of .9999 fineness comprise 90% to 95% of total inventory“

“All gold kilo bar inventory at Malca Amit and Brinks, Inc. are of brands listed as accredited refiners on LBMA and are acceptable for delivery against the Gold Kilo futures contract.”

Added to the above, another window of transparency into the Hong Kong kilobar market opened up when the CME gold kilobar contract was launched in March 2015 (see below).

On 13 March 2015, CME announced that it had approved an application by G4S International Logistics (Hong Kong) to be a carrier for the CME gold kilo contract in Hong Kong. Note that this approval to be a carrier (a secure transporter) is not the same as vault/facility approval. Brinks and Malca-Amit were already, at that time, approved carriers for the CME’s gold kilo contract.

When the CME Hong Kong kilobar contract was launched in March 2015, the huge 110 tonnes of kilobar holdings at Malca-Amit’s Hong Kong vault that had been held there at the end of 2014 had mysteriously dropped to approximately 1 tonne. See CME warehouse report, dated 20 March 2015 for the Hong Kong gold kilo contract. This 110+ tonnes of kilobars in the Malca-Amit vault prior to the end of 2014 could in theory have been moved to the HKIA vault since both vaults are located adjacent to the Hong Kong International Airport. Another possibility is that these kilobars were transported back to the London market so as to arbitrage kilobar premiums.

However, when the CME kilo gold futures contract was launched in March 2015, the amount of kilobar gold at the Brinks facility in Hong Kong remained high, at over 23 tonnes of kilobars in mid-March 2015.

Notice that at launch time in March 2015, only Brinks and Malca-Amit were listed on the above CME warehouse report. This is because the HKIA Precious Metals Depository and Via Mat vaults hadn’t been approved. HKIA was never approved because it withdrew its application (see 3 June 2015 CME official notice that CME had approved the application withdrawal of HKIA).

On 12 June, the CME announced that the Via Mat vault (which by then had changed name to Loomis after the Loomis acquisition of Via Mat) was approved for use by the CME gold kilo contract. Via Mat/Loomis then began appearing on the daily CME report alongside Brinks and Malca-Amit. However, since the inception of the contract, there has been very little kilobar gold reported in any of the Hong Kong vaults except for Brinks.

The below report of CME eligible Hong Kong gold kilo warehouse stocks as of 6 April 2016 shows that the Brinks Hong Kong vault facilities still hold by far the most kilobars out of the three reported facilities. The CME kilobar gold stocks can be viewed daily at this link, although the spreadsheet at the link changes daily, but retains the same spreadsheet name. For example, there were 31.14 tonnes of gold kilobars in the Brinks Hong Kong vault on 6 April.

While the daily vault report almost always shows a lot of kilobars coming into and being withdrawn from the Brinks vault, what is not clear from the daily CME Hong Kong vaults report, but which is clear from tracking the accumulated flows since the inception of the contract, is that a massive 1,121 tonnes of gold kilobars have passed through the Brinks Hong Kong vault since the inception of the CME gold kilo contract in March 2015. This movement is perfectly illustrated in the following startling chart from Nick Laird of Sharelynx who keeps track of this Brinks Hong Kong activity.

Source: www.sharelynx.com

In just over 12 months, more than one-third of annual gold mine supply has passed through the Brinks Hong Kong gold vault facilities in the form of gold kilobars. This, I would argue, makes looking at the CME New York COMEX vault reports a side-show exercise compared to where the real physical gold is flowing through.

With such a high ‘churn’ rate of gold arriving into the Brinks Hong Kong vault and then leaving again, this vault must be primarily a distribution vault and not a long-term storage vault.

Source: www.sharelynx.com

Notice in the following chart how eligible gold inventory, in the form of gold kilobars, has remained at a fairly static and low-level in the Loomis (Via Mat) Hong Kong warehouse for the last 9 months. Loomis only began reporting its eligible gold kilobar inventory in mid-June 2015.

Source: www.sharelynx.com

Notice in the following Malca-Amit eligible inventory chart, the dramatic disappearance of over 100 tonnes of gold sometime between the end of December 2015, and March 2015, and the very low and static eligible inventory since then.

Source: www.sharelynx.com

It seems very odd that the volume of kilobar gold held in Malca-Amit’s Hong Kong vault facility dropped dramatically to 1 tonne between the end of 2014 and early 2015. After all, Malca-Amit applied to the CME to have its Hong Kong vault facility approved to be ‘regular for delivery‘ for the kilobar contracts, and furthermore, Malca-Amit’s vaults in Hong Kong have a gold storage capacity of 1000 tonnes, and furthermore, the kilobar, which would show up in eligible holdings, is the gold bar size of choice for the Asian markets.

According to the CME Group, a depository, such as Malca-Amit, is required to report inventory on the ‘facility’ that is ‘regular for delivery’ with the Exchange, and not just report the inventory in one or another of the vaults in that facility. Malca-Amit has 5 vaults in its Hong Kong facility (see below).

The CME told me:

Each Depository is required to report inventory for each one of its facilities that is regular for delivery with the Exchange. Further information on obligations of metal service providers can be found in Rule 703 in Chapter 7 of the NYMEX Rulebook at http://www.cmegroup.com/rulebook/NYMEX/1/7.pdf.

The CME’s terminology “Regular for Delivery” refers to the following CME definitions:

The Malca-Amit Vault Facility in Hong Kong

“Hong Kong’s largest gold-storage facility, which can hold about 22 percent of the bullion now in Fort Knox, will open in September to meet rising demand from banks and the wealthy, according to owner Malca-Amit Global Ltd.

The facility, located on the ground floor of a building within the international airport compound, has capacity for 1,000 metric tons, said Joshua Rotbart, general manager for the Hong Kong-based company’s Malca-Amit Precious Metals unit. Two of the vaults may hold assets, including gold, for banks and financial institutions, and others will be used for diamonds, jewelry, fine art and precious metals, said Rotbart.”

A series of 12 captioned photos, taken inside Malca-Amit’s vaults on 23 July 2012, can be seen in this Getty Images photo sequence, by photographer Jerome Favre (for Bloomberg via Getty Images).

“This room is in asecret location in Hong Kong. We’re not able to show you the exterior of the building for security reasons. Outside it look like an ordinary warehouse. Inside its anything but ordinary.”

It turns out this ‘secret location’ is not so secret after all (and its even listed in a CME Group spreadsheet once you know the address to look for). Bloomberg’s reference to secret location therefore looks far-fetched and dramatic, and is not surprising given that Bloomberg seems to have ceased to provide independent journalism.

The first pointer as to the vault location comes from an article in the publication Security Asia, Issue 3, 2013, pages 10-11, “Hong Kong’s Cave of Wonders“, which profiles the Malca-Amit Hong Kong facility, and states:

“Construction began on Asia’s largest private secure storage facility in February 2012, at significant but undisclosed cost. Spanning two ground floor units of a Chek Lap Kok commercial building, the vault took five months to build using 264 tonnes of reinforced steel and some 600 cubic metres of cement. Essentially, the vault comprises discrete units within the original units.

This state-of–the-art facility is designed, constructed and managed by Malca-Amit and so discreet that it took Security Asia staff a while to find the entrance, to the evident amusement of observers in the control room.

In fact there are five vaults: a common vault, a diamond vault, two smaller vaults for the use of major financial institutions, and a vault specifically designed for storing fine arts and collectibles. The fine art vault is a first for Hong Kong we are told, as it combines full vault security with climate control and FM 200 fire suppression.

Each vault has a colour-coded floor for instant recognition by CCTV operatives in the control room. Security levels escalate as we approach the vault area, with dual and triple access control systems in place.”

The Security Asia article therefore confirms that the vault facility is located in a commercial building in Chek Lap Kok. Chek Lap Kok is the redeveloped island, just north of Lantau Island, where Hong Kong’s International airport is located, hence the reference by Bloomberg to the vault being “located on the ground floor of a building within the international airport compound.”

Therefore, in October 2011, Malca Amit Far East Ltd entered a new lease for 24,339 sq ft of space for units G30 and G31 at the Airport Freight Forward Centre. Construction on the facility then began in February 2012 (see above).

The Airport Freight Forward Centre (AFFC) is a huge three-floor warehousing facility owned by Sun Hung Kai Properties. Apart from some of the air-side warehousing terminals in the actual airport precinct, the AFFC is the only major warehouse complex in the area. The tenant list of the AFFC even lists Malca Amit Far East Ltd, so again, Bloomberg’s reference to a secret location seems to be for dramatic effect only.

Outside the Malca Amit vault at the AFFC

The plan of the ground floor of the AFFC warehouse can be seen here, which reveals that units 30 and 31 are self-contained and distinct from the other units on the ground floor, and are adjacent to the warehouse’s truck ramp.

Therefore, this vast Malca Amit facility at the AFFC, that’s approved by the CME as ‘regular for delivery’ for the gold kilobar contract, only holds just over 1 tonne of gold kilobars, and according to the CME’s daily gold kilobar stocks report, since March 2015, the Malca Amit facility has seen very little throughput (deposits or withdrawals) of gold kilobars. Again, in my view, it is very odd, that the largest gold vaulting facility in Hong Kong reports such low gold kilobar activity.

In Hong Kong, Malca-Amit Far East Ltd uses a company called Security Associates Asset Protection Ltd to operate its drivers/security crew for the Chep Lap Kok vault.

Because Malca Amit’s Hong Kong vault is approved for delivery of the CME group’s Hong Kong kilo gold futures contract, the vault address is also listed in one of the CME’s spreadsheet’s, which is on the CME site here.

That CME spreadsheet also lists the approved Brinks vaulting facility address in Hong Kong, which is located as Kwai Chung Container Terminal.

The Brinks Vault Facility in Hong Kong

The Brinks vault facility is located at Unit 1022W, 1/F, ATL Logistics Centre AC, Kwai Chung Container Terminal, Berth No.3, Kwai Chung. So this is the vault through which more than 1100 tonnes of gold has passed through between March 2015, and April 2016. The ATL Logistics Centre is a huge warehousing complex owned by DP World and the Goodman Group.

ATL Logistics Centre

A brochure of the ATL Logistics Centre can be seen here. Note that the former precious metals refinery of Johnson Matthey was in Kwai Chung. This refinery facility was acquired by Metalor Technologies (Hong Kong) Ltd in 2007, and Metalor now operates its refinery there. Johnson Matthey Hong Kong had been operating its refinery in Kwai Chung since 1992.

“As per reftel A request and at the direction of the Office of Enforcement Analysis (OEA) of the USDOC Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), Export Control Officer Philip Ankel (ECO), conducted a pre-license check at Brink’s Hong Kong Limited, 1022W First Floor, Kwai Chung Container Terminal 3, New Territories, Hong Kong (Brink’s Hong Kong). The purpose of the visit was to determine the suitability of Brink’s Hong Kong to be the recipient of 28 tactical police riot helmets and 100 harnesses/chin straps that are the subject of export license application D362247.”

A G4S Vault Facility in Hong Kong

This SGSIA list also shows an address for G4S Cash Solutions (Hong Long) Limited of Securicor Centre, 418 Castle Peak Road, Cheung Sha Wan, Kowloon. Recall that G4S International Logistics (Hong Kong) is a CME Group approved carrier for the CME kilobar gold contract, but not a CME approved storage facility(vault). Looking at this Securicor Centre, 418 Castle Peak Road address in StreetView, it conveniently shows a G4S armoured van exiting a secure gated entrance on to Castle Park Road, right beside the main entrance to the Securicor Centre. Note that Securicor merged with Group 4 in 2004 to form G4S. So possibily G4S has a precious metals storage area in this Castle Peak Road facility. This would have precedent, since G4S Cash Solutions (UK) Ltd is the entity that operates the G4S precious metals vault facility at Park Royal in London, which was previously leased by Deustche Bank and is now leased by ICBC Standard Bank.

G4S at Castle Peak Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong

The HKIA Precious Metals Depository Limited

HKIA Precious Metals Depository Limited is a fully owned subsidiary of the Airport Authority of Hong Kong, which is itself owned by the Hong Kong SAR Government. The HKIA Depository vault is a 340-square-metre facility located ‘airside’, within the grounds of Hong Kong International Airport. Therefore, there are 2 precious metals vaults in and around Hong Kong Airport, the HKIA Depository, and the Malca -Amit vaults at the AFFC.

A 340 sq metre space (3660 sq feet) is quite a small facility, and this, along with the HKIA facility’s location adjacent to the runways, would suggest that it is a transit vault for inbound and outbound precious metals freight, i.e. high throughput.

According to a 2012 LBMA Alchemist article, HKIA also claims to be a long-term storage vault, as well as a transit vault:

“Since it started offering its services three years ago, the Hong Kong International Airport Precious Metals Depository has focused on providing both long-term and transit storage for LBMA good delivery bars, as well as tael bars that are used in local delivery in the Hong Kong gold market. Silver and other types of precious metals have also been stored at the facility. For LBMA good delivery bars in particular, but also for other precious metals, the Depository has served not only as a storage vault, but also as a physical settlement and delivery venue for traders from around the world.”

The Chinese Gold and Silver Exchange Society, which operates Hong Kong’s Chinese Gold and Silver Exchange (CGSE), also planned to utilise the HKIA precious metals vault since according to a May 2013 press release (CGSE statement May 2013) from the CGSE’s president, Haywood Cheung:

“our Exchange (CGSE) will set up gold and silver vaults at the Hong Kong International Airport and VIAMAT, a professional warehousing and logistics company.”

And at least one Hong Kong based ETF, the Value Gold ETF, uses the HKIA vault as custodian. This ETF is very small and only holds 2,224.78 kgs as of 7 April 2016. the Value Gold ETF gold bar list can be viewed in a link at the bottom right corner of this page, and contains a lot a majority of Heraeus (HK) and Metalor (HK) bars as well as some Perth Mint bars.

The South China Morning Post also reported that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority has stored its gold at the HKIA vault since 2009.

“The Hong Kong Monetary Authority brought all its gold home in 2009 and stored it at the airport depository when the facility came on stream.”

“The city’s ‘Fort Knox’ opened in 2009 at the Chek Lap Kok airport. The 340 square metre depository has double security doors and bulletproof steel walls. After its opening, the HKMA shifted its entire gold reserve – the amount has never been specified – back from London.”

At he end of 2008, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority had a relatively small amount of gold, just over 2 tonnes, specifically, 66,798 ounces of gold.

“At the airport there is a little-known labyrinth of halls, equipped with state-of-the art security cameras and patrolled by heavily armed guards

In a hi-tech treasure vault are billions of dollars worth of gold bullion, gold bars, silver and platinum. They are securely sealed off behind the thick steel doors of the Hong Kong International Airport Precious Metals Depository.”

Finally, where is the Hong Kong Airport Authority’s Precious Metals Depository building. In December 2015, I asked HKIA (media@hkairport.com) where its HKIA Despository vault is located, however, HKIA, probably not surprisingly, did not reply to my email. Given that the HKIA vault location is apparently such a secret (and is not listed in any publicly accessible documentation), some speculation is allowed.

My feeling is that the HKIA Depository is not in a “little-known labyrinth of halls”, but is in one of the buildings in the restricted area down near Cheong Yip Road, past the Regal Airport Hotel, near a building which is the headquarters of Aviation Security Company Limited. Hong Kong airport’s main security company “Aviation Security Company Limited“, provides practically all the security at Hong Kong International Airport. Its address is “1 Cheong Yip Road, Hong Kong International Airport”. At the end of this road is the beginning of a restricted area of a series of silver/grey coloured buildings which are ‘airside’, right beside the runways, and are boarded by North Perimeter Road, Cheong Tat Road and Cheong Yip Road. There are various road entrances to this area, all of which are ‘restricted’.

“There are seven custodians offering vaulting services in the London bullion market, three of whom are also clearing members of the LBMA (Barclays, HSBC and JP Morgan). There are also four other security carriers, who are also LBMA members (Brinks, G4S Cash Solutions (UK), Malca Amit and Loomis International (UK) Ltd). The Bank of England also offers a custodian service (gold only).”

These 8 custodians are then listed in a pdf document on the LBMA website with their head office addresses, but not the vault addresses. So where are the actual vaults?

“The London-based Malca-Amit vault is conveniently located close to Heathrow airport. The vault is graded at level XII CD EX, the highest European Vault classification and is complemented by the most up to date security systems including the Avigilon CCTV suite with cameras capturing 29 megapixels per frame.

The vault is authorised by the members of the London Clearing Company and has LBMA approval for the weighing and inspecting of precious metals.“

Notice the reference to London Clearing Company. This is a reference to the London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL), a private precious metals clearing consortium comprising HSBC, JP Morgan, Barclays, The Bank of Nova Scotia – ScotiaMocatta, and UBS.

Driving around in Circles?

The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) actually featured Malca-Amit’s London vault in a slightly tongue in cheek article by Aelred Connelly titled “Visit to Malca-Amit’s New Vault” which appeared in Issue 68 of the LBMA’s Alchemist magazine in October 2012.

The article begins:

“It was a balmy day when we arrived at Feltham station where we were warmly greeted by our host for the day, Allan Finn, Global Commodities Director for Malca-Amit. Allan told us that the location of the vault was top secret so he deviously drove his car round in circles until we were so disorientated we had no idea where he had taken us.”

And ends with:

“Our tour came to an end. Allan drove his car round in circles again until we were so disorientated that we didn’t know where we had come from. But he made up for it by taking us for a nice lunch on the river at Richmond.

Apart from driving around in circles between Feltham Station and the vault destination, the article also tells us that:

“Malca-Amit became a member of the LBMA in March 2012 and shortly afterwards completed the building of a new vault facility close to Heathrow airport…..

…the new secure storage facility was opened in April 2012 near Heathrow airport.“

So it seems that Malca-Amit was granted Ordinary membership status of the LBMA just prior to its new vault becoming operational. The granting of Ordinary membership was probably a precursor to the Malca-Amit vault being, in the words of Malca-Amit, “authorised by the members of the London Clearing Company ..[with].. LBMA approval for the weighing and inspecting of precious metals.”

The LBMA Alchemist profile goes on to say:

“Built above ground, the Malca-Amit vault is one of a number of new facilities that either have been built or which will be opened shortly within the perimeter of the M25….. Proximity to an airport is an advantage.“

“When we eventually arrived at our destination only the sound of planes overhead gave any indication as to where we were.”

“Before we went in to the building Allan explained that the perimeter fencing can withstand a 7.5-ton vehicle at 50 mph and the internal shutter anti-ram barrier which is located behind the entrance gates can withstand a 7.5-ton vehicle at 30 mph.”

“But the thing that strikes you most is the vault. Allan explained that it is a Chubbsafegrade XII which offers the highest possible level of security and provides capacity for more than 300 metric tonnes of gold and 1,000 tonnes of silver.“

“Gold and silver are not the only precious items in storage: there are also diamonds and other precious stones and jewellery which are kept in storage on behalf of clients.”

Where then could Malca-Amit’s recently opened gold and silver vault be located?

Arena Building, Parkway

It turns out that in a similar manner to G4S when it made a planning application amendment for its new vault building at Abbey Road in Park Royal, Malca-Amit was also not shy of listing its building location on the internet, for it too listed the location of its new vault in a planning application amendment submission dated July 2013.

Which leads us to the questions: what is and where is this Arena Building?

In 2011, the already completed Arena Parkway building, profiled in a glossy brochure, was marketed on a UK commercial real estate website called NovaLoca commercial property finder. This brochure pdf file was created on 14 July 2011. So although Malca-Amit may have “completed the building of a new vault facility” as the LBMA stated, it did not build the building in which the vault is located. The building had already been built prior to 2011.

The ‘Arena’ building is in the ‘Parkway Heathrow M4’ industrial estate off Cranford Lane, in Heston, in the Hounslow area to the north-east of Heathrow airport. Anyone who knows that area around Hounslow will know that the one of the landing routes into Heathrow Airport is a very low approach along a route right above where this building is located.

According to the brochure:

“The Arena provides a modern detached warehouse unit of 23,660 sq ft with a self-contained secure yard and benefits from 24-hour security, an on-site management team and surveillance cameras.”

“The unit is available on a new Full Repairing and Insuring lease basis.”

Additional information in the 2011 brochure includes such facts as:

“NEW DISTRIBUTION/WAREHOUSE UNIT 23,660 sq ft (2,198 sq m)”

Description The Arena is a new high quality warehouse suitable for production, storage, research and development, laboratories and general distribution. It has an impressive reception leading to first floor fully fitted offices. The property is constructed of brick and profile metal composite cladding with double glazed windows fitted with solar shading.

Given that this Arena building was being marketed from July 2011 onwards, and that Malca-Amit began operating the vault facility from April 2012, then it would suggest, as would be expected, that Malca-Amit took possession, and then fitted out the building to its own specific requirements, including the vault, before opening for business in April 2012.

The Arena building is in the London Borough of Hounslow, so it is instructive to examine planning applications made for this building in and around the dates that Malca-Amit took occupancy.

A planning search for TW5 9QA on the Hounslow planning website reveals that plans for this Arena Parkway building were submitted from as early as December 2007, but there seems to have been a long drawn out series of planning applications and amendements made for the construction, the latest being submitted in December 2008 and approved by Hounslow Council in February 2009. Therefore, construction of the building would have commenced sometime after February 2009.

The planning applications for the Arena building, which were submitted by CGNU Life Assurance Ltd / Aviva Investors, summarise the project as follows:

“System Reference: P/2008/3669

Planning Reference: 00315/F/P59(6)

Following approval for demolition of the existing office building and construction of new industrial and warehouse unit with ancillary office accommodation, new entrances off existing access road, car parking, landscaping and roof mounted photo-voltaic panels details submitted pursuant to Condition 6 (waste and recycled materials storage) of permission dated 18/03/08

The Arena drawings document submitted with the most recent building application shows a layout in keeping with the size and shape of the structure that was actually built, so it looks like the development was completed in accordance with the last approved set of plans.

Malca Amit Arena Parkway TW5 9QA

Fencing

Following occupancy by Malca-Amit, the only planning application submitted for the Arena Building since then is application “Planning Reference: 00315/F/P61″ which addressed improved fencing around the site.

“The application seeks to improve the existing security around the site. The existing bollards around the site would be made good to existing low-level shrub planting. The fencing around the part of the site would be a 2.4m high 358 mesh panel fence powder 600 mm high electric fence above. This fencing would be on the north, south and west parts of the site. There would be a 6m cantilevered sliding gate, which would be 2.4m high with serrated top – RAL 9005 (black) finish.

In order to secure parking on site a car park gate has been proposed whichruns off the access road. This would be 3m wide rising barrier which wouldbe 1m high, RAL 9003 (white) finish with contrasting red banding. Therewould be 1m wide exit gate which would be next to the unit.”

The Site Plan and Elevation for the above application put some visuals on the above delegated report text. This fencing is therefore the fencing that Allan Finn of Malca-Amit was referring to when he told the LBMA that the”perimeter fencing can withstand a 7.5-ton vehicle at 50 mph and the internal shutter anti-ram barrier which is located behind the entrance gates can withstand a 7.5-ton vehicle at 30 mph.”

The Edinburgh Assay Office and UKAS

Not only is Malca-Amit located in this Arena Parkway Building, but so is the Edinburgh Assay Office. Although the Edinburgh Assay office has its headquarters in Goldsmiths Hall, Edinburgh, in Scotland, it also operates a laboratory at a Heathrow Sub Office where it is accredited for “Chemical Tests for the purpose of hallmarking”.

This fact is revealed in a series of United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) reports that were posted on the UKAS website in June 2015. On 8 June 2015, UKAS posted a report about the Edinburgh Assay Office on its website titled “The Edinburgh Assay Office Issue No: 010 Issue date: 08 June 2015″. This report lists a ‘Heathrow Sub Office’ for the Edinburgh Assay Office without specifying its address.

Although the Issue 010 report from UKAS replaced its Issue 009 version a few days later, the Issue 009 version remained in the Google cache as a Google search result and also as a complete cached document:

Cached version of Issue 009

The commercial logic for the Edinburgh Assay Office having a presence in Malca-Amit’s Arena building seems to be that, in addition to Malca-Amit storing precious metals and precious stones and jewellery in the building, the location is also convenient for the rest of the Heathrow area where precious metals and jewellery are constantly arriving into and departing from. This is the ‘Hallmarking in Transit’ service offered by the Edinburgh Assay Office, offered in conjunction with Malca-Amit, and explained on the Assay Office website here, and also on Malca-Amit’s website here.

This is not the only UK-based assay office to maintain a sub-office in the premises of a secure precious metals transport and secure storage operator near Heathrow Airport. The Goldsmiths Company – Assay Office, which is headquartered in the City of London, also operates a Heathrow Sub Office in “Unit 7, Radius Park, Faggs Road, Feltham, Middlesex, TW14 0NG”. This is listed in a UKAS report “The Goldsmiths’ Company – Assay Office Issue 016 Issue Date 05 August 2014″. This ‘Unit 7 Radius Park’ is a Brinks building and it too contains a vault, but that’s another vault profile for another day.

“ICBC Standard Bank is buying the lease on Deutsche Bank’s London gold and silver vault, enlarging its footprint in the city’s bullion market..”

“ICBC.. has also applied to become a clearing member of the London gold and silver over-the-counter business.“

“The vault became operational in June 2014 and has a capacity of 1,500 tonnes. It was built and is managed by British security services company G4S.“

These moves by ICBC Standard Bank have now put both the G4S vault and LPMCL, (a private company), back in the spotlight.

The Background to the G4S Vault

On 20 March 2012, Deutsche Bank issued a press release announcing that it had contracted security company G4S to construct and manage a precious metals vault on Deutsche’s behalf in London. Critically, this was a substantial long-term partnership between Deutsche Bank and G4S, with G4S doing the actual work of building and then operating the precious metals vault. Deutsche stated at the time in March 2012 that the new vault would be for the exclusive use of Deutsche Bank clients, and that it would available for use by these clients during 2013:

“Deutsche Bank and G4S are pleased to announce that they are to join forcesin establishing a new vault for the storage of precious metals in the UK.”

“The new vault will be built and managed by G4S, the world’s leading international security solutions group, for the exclusive use of Deutsche Bank and its clients and will be an enhancement to Deutsche Bank’s already extensive metal trading and clearing capabilities.”

“‘It will position us well to quickly become a leading metals clearing and custody house,’commented Raymond Key, Global Head of Metals Trading at Deutsche Bank.The vault, which will be constructed and run to industry-leading standards of security, will be available for clients in 2013.“

Likewise, on 20 March 2012,G4S released its own press release in which it revealed that the contract with Deutsche Bank was a 10 year commercial deal and that discussions about building the vault had commenced in 2009:

“Working in partnership with Deutsche Bank, the business has secured a ten year commercial arrangement to establish a state of the art precious metals vault that will be built and managed by G4S, and will enable Deutsche Bank to extend and enhance their metal trading and clearing capabilities.

Discussions started with Deutsche Bank back in 2009 when increased economic volatility started to cause a rise in interest levels among investors for precious metals.”

“James Dinsdale, Managing Director, G4S Cash Solutions, said: ‘We’re delighted to have secured this partnership with Deutsche Bank….. This agreement represents a strategic move in the UK market place for G4S.”

“Clyde & Co has advised global security and logistics company G4S in relation to a project for Deutsche Bank.

G4S will build and manage a gold bullion secure storage vault in the UK for Deutsche Bank.”

What none of the press releases mentioned was that the precious metal vault was being integrated into the basement of a new G4S operating centre in Park Royal, London.

As it turns out, Deutsche did not deliver on its self-publicised deadline for the new vault becoming available to its clients in 2013. However, on 9 June 2014, over 2 years after announcing the London vault project, a much reduced Deutsche Bank London precious metals business that had substantially stepped back from the London Gold Market, confirmed to Reuters that it had finally opened its new London precious metals vault. Note that Reuters is usually the first distribution channel that the London Gold Market PR machine contacts to get its stories out on to the newswires.

– Deutsche Bank ‘failed to sell’ its gold and silver fixing seats (despite ICBC Standard Bank being interested), and Deutsche then merely resorted to withdrawing from the fixings (April/May 2014)

– Deutsche Bank’s Matthew Keen, who was a director of London Gold Market Fixing Limited (LGMFL), London Silver Market Fixing Limited (LSMFL), and London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL) resigned from Deutsche Bank, prompting the appointment of other Deutsche representatives to those company directorships (January 2014)

– Deutsche Bank’s representative on the London Bullion Market Association’s (LBMA) management committee, Ronan Donohoe, resigned from the LBMA management committee on 5 March 2014, only 7 months into a 2 year appointment (March 2014)

Given all the above retrenchments affecting its precious metals activities in London, it is slightly odd that Deutsche Bank still went ahead in June 2014 and announced the opening, at least in name, of its London precious metals vault collaboration with G4S. Perhaps it had a contractual obligation with G4S to do so.

But odder still is that less that 5 months after announcing the opening of the new vault, Deutsche Bank then stepped back even further by closing its physical precious metals trading operation in London in November 2014, and then announced in December 2014 that it would actually be interested in selling its London gold vault. This decision is beyond bizarre given the huge level of commitment that Deutsche Bank had made to the development of the vault for at least 4-5 years beginning in 2009.

“Deutsche Bank is open to offers for its London-based gold vault following the closure of its physical precious metals business, three sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. ‘If the right offer came along, then the bank would sell the London vault,’ one source close to the situation said.

The German bank shut its physical precious metals trading arm last month as it further reduced its exposure to commodity markets.”

“Deutsche declined to comment on the status of its vaulting operation.“

“…it could be difficult for Deutsche Bank to find buyers among its nearest peers. But sources familiar with the matter said a Chinese entity could come forward. ICBC is trying to build a presence in London and the sources said it was a likely candidate. ICBC declined to comment.”

The key question is did this Deutsche Bank vault in London, operated by G4S, ever do any precious metals business in the time between June 2014 and November 2014? If it did, then this activity could not have been substantial.

Deutsche Bank clients holding allocated gold and other precious metals with Deutsche in London would not have been impressed if they were told their holdings were being moved to the new vault in the summer of 2014, only to find out a few months later that Deutsche was looking to exit its involvement with the vault.

While the G4S / Deutsche vault sales process seemed to remain on hold for the entire year of 2015 with no announced activity from either Deutsche bank or ICBC, and no media scrutiny, Deutsche continued to exit the physical gold business in London amid a number of other significant developments. In August 2015, Deutsche departed from the London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL) company, leaving HSBC, JP Morgan, Bank of Nova Scotia, Barclays, and UBS as the remaining 5 members of the London gold and silver clearing consortium.

“Deutsche Bank is to sever its last link with commodity trading by resigning as a clearing member of the London gold and silver over-the-counter business..” [LPMCL]

It’s a little known fact that London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL) (company number 04195299) is a UK private limited company with the same registered address as the London Gold Market Fixing Limited and the London Silver Market Fixing Company Limited. This registered address is C/O Hackwood Secretaries Limited, One Silk Street, London EC2Y 8HQ. Indeed, Hackwood Secretaries Limited is the Company Secretary for LPMCL. Hackwood Secretaries Limited is one of the companies Linklaters uses to offer its company sectretariat services. And Linklaters is one of the better known ‘magic circle’ global law firms that is headquartered in London.

While LPMCL has so far managed to steer clear of US class actions suits concerning precious metals manipulation accusations, its fellow Linklater registered gold and silver fixing companies, London Gold Market Fixing Limited and the London Silver Market Fixing Company Limited, both of which have had a lot of the same directors as LPMCL, have not been so lucky on the class action front, and both companies are now facing live consolidated class action suits in New York courts.

Each member bank of LPMCL usually appoints two directors who are senior staff members of that investment bank. So with 6 investment banks within LPMCL, there are usually 11-12 LPMCL directors, give or take a few people who would invariably be moving bank at any given time.

Deutsche Bank’s two last-serving directors of LPMCL, Raj Kumar and David Mitchell-Innes, actually resigned from LPMCL on 9th February and 1st September 2015, respectively. The February 2015 LPMCL resignation by Kumar seems to have been precipitated by his internal move within Deutsche Bank for a short while to the role of Global COO for Commodities, but then significantly, Kumar left Deutsche Bank in July 2015 to take up a role in ICBC Standard Bank in September 2015 as a managing director in ICBC Standard’s precious metals business, as Reuters reported on 17 September:

Kumar, who will be based in London, joins from Deutsche Bank AG, where he was managing director of precious metals business.”

This Deutsche Bank – ICBC Standard Bank – LPMCL link in the form of Raj Kumar was undoubtedly useful to ICBC Standard in its move to take on Park Royal vault lease from Deutsche Bank, and could help facilitate ICBC Standard’s stance in an application to become a member of LPMCL.

However, the 20 August Reuters report also interestingly stated that Standard Chartered might be interested in becoming a LPMCL member:

“…there is one other bank, Standard Chartered, that could become a gold and silver clearing member in the next few months.”

Could this be a typo by Reuters when it meant to say Standard Bank? Possibly, but most likely not. Standard Chartered is an important bank in the London Gold Market in its role as a LBMA market maker in spot and options for gold and silver which it secured in February 2015. But Standard Bank is not to be confused with Standard Chartered bank. They are two entirely separate banking institutions, albeit with historical connections.

Standard Chartered is headquartered in London, and is well-known for its emerging markets focus, particularly in Asia and Africa. The ‘Standard’ in Standard Chartered in some ways does refer to the South African ‘Standard Bank’, since Standard Chartered was created in 1969 through the merger of Standard Bank of British South Africa and Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. However in 1987, Standard Chartered sold its shareholding in Standard Bank.

In April 2015, Reuters said of Whitehead’s pending departure from Barclays:

“Barclays’ global head of metals and mining sales Martyn Whitehead will leave the bank as part of its restructuring and exit from some parts of its commodities business, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters on Monday.

Whitehead was Barclays’ only representative listed with London Precious Metals Clearing Ltd. Barclays is one of the six banks that organise and co-ordinate bullion clearing and vaulting in London.”

Therefore, could two former directors of LPMCL, namely Raj Kumar and Martyn Whitehead, now be spearheading applications on the part of their respective new employers, ICBC Standard Bank and Standard Chartered, to both join the private club that is London Precious Metals Clearing Limited, and have access to the exorbitant privilege of being part of the London Gold Market’s private gold clearing consortium, and preferential treatment form the Bank of England gold and foreign exchange desk?

ICBC

China’s largest bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), has been eager to become a premier player in the London Gold Market for some time now. Although it became an Ordinary Member of the LBMA in 2012, ICBC had stated in 2012 its desire to become a LBMA Market Making Member. ICBC was also interested in buying Deutsche Bank’s seat in the old Gold Fixing in 2014, but strangely this sale never happened. See my BullionStar blog “Chinese Banks as direct participants in the new LBMA Gold and Silver Price auctions? Not so fast!” from March 2015 under section “ICBC and Standard Bank” for more details on this.

ICBC also stated in June 2015 that it wanted to become a direct participant in the LBMA Gold Price auction, but again strangely this has not yet happened despite 2 other Chinese banks, namely Bank of China and China Construction Bank (CCB), eventually being authorised by the LBMA to join up to the LBMA Gold Price auction on 22 June 2015 and 30 October 2015, respectively.

Prior to the controlling interest purchase by ICBC, Standard Bank was no stranger to London Gold Market gold vaulting, and a 2009 report from Abu Dahbi’s “The National” on United Arab Emirates related bullion stated that gold had:

“moved to the vaults of Standard Bank of South Africa, located in the London offices of JPMorgan Chase at 60 Victoria Embankment, Blackfriars, London.”

The ‘vaults of Standard Bank‘ reference just refers to allocated or sub-leased space in the JP Morgan vault in London in the name of Standard Bank of South Africa.

Finally, ICBC also has a strategic interest in the London platinum group metals market through Standard Bank Plc’s existing participation in the London Platinum and Palladium Market especially through the daily platinum and palladium fix auctions, which are now administered by the LME on behalf of the LBMA.

The Park Royal VAULT

As first revealed by Zerohedge in December 2014, the London precious metal vault that was built by G4S on behalf of Deutsche Bank is located at in the Park Royal area of London at 291 Abbey Road, London NW10 7SA.

This Park Royal location was actually telegraphed by G4S itself as early as July 2013 when ‘G4S Cash Solutions’ advertised for “Precious Metals Vault Officers” for the new vault in a job advert on the careers section of its own website, which listed the job location as ‘Park Royal, West London‘. Not really a very security conscious approach for whats purports to be one of the world’s foremost security companies. The job adverts included the following:

“Precious Metals Vault Officers

Location: Park Royal, West London

Number of Positions:16

Closing Date: November 2, 2013

G4S Cash Solutions, in partnership with one of the world’s leading financial institutions, is launching a Precious Metal Vault in West London. The vault which has been created with innovative, state of the art design and technology is at the leading edge of the global bullion storage industry.

We are now recruiting an exceptional team of Precious Metal Vault Officers who will operate and secure our vault in this exciting, new venture.”

“responsible for processing all inbound, outbound and stock management transactions and movements of Precious Metals”

“The operation and use of a Vault Management System together with specialist Precious Metals equipment”

“The conduct of receipting, weighing and stowing of Precious Metals including their physical movement in and around the Vault “

“G4S is the largest secure solutions company in the world…Our Cash Management Solutions business has expertise in cash and valuables transportation, cash processing, ATM and cash centre outsourcing, secure storage and retrieval.”

“Responsible for the management, security and operations of the precious metals vault including security and traceability of all assets entering and leaving the vault.”

Planning and implementing the conduct of receipting, weighing and stowing of precious metals including their physical movement in and around the vault

Planning for and implementing the conduct of picking, packing and shipping of precious metals including their physical movement in and around the vault

There were also similar job adverts on the G4S website for other positions at Park Royal including “Precious Metals Shift Manager” (Positions: 4, closing date 31 October 2013), and “Secure Driver” (Positions:15, closing date 23 June 2014, “Deliver cash and valuables to various customers in a physically active role“).

Note that the closing date for the Secure Driver applicants was a few weeks after Deutsche Bank had announced on 6 June 2014 that it had opened the gold vault. So if the drivers hadn’t even been hired in June 2014 and probably not in July 2014 either, then there was nothing being moved in or out of the vault at that time, and there was most likely never any Deutsche Bank precious metals moved in or out of the G4S vault, which would also explain why, in December 2014, “Deutsche declined to comment on the status of its vaulting operation”, and would therefore make the vault an extremely bad and money losing investment decision for Deutsche Bank, as well as a bizarre business decision to commit substantially investment to the vault and then walk away from it 2 years later.

From July to August 2013, G4S even tweeted about these Park Royal roles on its Twitter account and stated the locations of the jobs roles and locations, for example, for “Vault Manager – Precious Metals in Park Royal“.

Not only that, but G4S even advertised these precious metals vault positions to the world on Facebook, complete with the specification of the Park Royal location.

Park Royal

Where is Park Royal? Most people in London, if they know Park Royal at all, would recognise the name as a tube station (train station) and as an area of North West London. Park Royal is just off the North Circular Road, in an industrial area, frequently congested with traffic, just down the road from Hanger Lane roundabout, another often traffic gridlocked area. But as the crow flies, Park Royal is not too far from Heathrow Airport, or the M25 ring-road, or Central London.

As well as telegraphing the general Park Royal area where the new vault was to be built, G4S also went further and specified the exact address of the new operating centre in a planning application document available on the web, conveniently pinpointing the vault building location in this large industrial sprawl, chock full of industrial parks and warehouses:

OFFICE OF THE TRAFFIC COMMISSIONER (LONDON AND THE SOUTH EAST OF ENGLAND) APPLICATIONS AND DECISIONS PUBLICATION DATE: 06 March 2014

Page 13 of document: Reference Number OK0229598 SI

G4S CASH SOLUTIONS (UK) LIMITED

Director(s): KEVIN O’CONNOR, Margaret Ann Ryan, Declan Hunt.

SUTTON PARK HOUSE, 15 CARSHALTON ROAD , SUTTON SM1 4LD

New operating centre: PARK ROYAL, 291 ABBEY ROAD LONDON NW10 7SA

New authorisation at this operating centre will be: 45 vehicle(s), 0 trailer(s)

In this case, the planning reference was referencing an increase in the number of vehicles allowed on the site. However, the more interesting planning applications are to be found not in the Office of the Traffic Commissioner, but in the website of Brent Council. These plans give a good overview of some of the details of the basement and vault that ICBC Standard Bank has just taken on the long-term lease for.

Planning applications for 291 Abbey Road NW10 7SA

The Park Royal area, including 291 Abbey RoadNW10 7SA, is under the remit of Brent Council Borough of London. Brent Council planning applications are available on the Brent Council Planning web site. On the Brent Council web site, there are 5 planning application ‘Case Numbers’ for 219 Abbey Road NW10 7SA submitted since 2012. The sequential nature of there being 5 case numbers just means that after the initial application was made, various details of the application were amended, which necessitated the applicant making subsequent submissions to the Council requesting the changes. This allows the amended plans of the G4S development to be compared to the initial plans. Each of the 5 applications have multiple scanned documents uploaded and attached to the applications.

Case Number 12/2112: This is the original planning application

“Erection of new 2-storey storage facility (Use Class B8)”. Use Class B8 means Distribution or Storage. B8 building use is for storage or as a distribution centre. This application was submitted on 9 August 2012, and the application was granted on 9 November 2012.

Pick Everard architectural practice describes itself on its website as “a leading independent, multi-professional consultancy practice working within the property, infrastructure and construction industry.”

Notice that on the diagram, there is a square-shaped basement specified on the floor plans, listed as ‘Basement Storage’, and this basement is specified as 1178 square metres. This 1178 sq mt space is approximately 34 metres * 34 metres. Furthermore, the ground floor level is listed as “Industrial Warehouse”, 1132 sq metres, with “Vehicle Loading Bays” at the rear, and the 2nd Floor level is listed as “Offices”.

“If you wish to store the higher value precious metals then you may find that insurers insist that your vaults are subterranean.”

It appears that these guidelines were specifically written for Deutsche Bank and G4S to follow since they were the only parties submitting a planning application for a new precious metals vault in London at that time, and the dates fit exactly. Case Number 12/2112 also includes an initial site location plan Project Park Royal – Document 120437 A 001 J Site Location Plan showing an overview of the site, with car park at front, building in the middle with truck loading bays at the back of the buildings, and truck parking at the rear of the site.

Case number 12/3371: Some small extra details

Case 12/3371 is just an application containing extra details about construction materials etc and security gates, barriers etc. This application was submitted on 18 December 2012, and granted on 12 February 2013.

Case Number 12/3344: Some small extra details

Case 12/3344 just covers some extra details such as car park spaces at the front of the site, for 32 cars, 30 staff/visitor spaces, and 2 disabled spaces. That application was submitted on December 2012, and granted on 13 February 2013.

Case Number 13/0722: Some important revisions to the Project, including a reduction in the size of the Basement

Case Number 13/0722 is interesting in that it included a reduction in the size of the basement from 1178 sq metres in the original application, to 750 sq metres. This application was submitted on 25 March 2013, and granted on 22 April 2013.

The accompanying Delegated Report specified a “Non-material amendment application to: (a) reduce basement area, and other changes such as (e) alterations to fencing, (f) reduction in number of vehicle loading bay shutters from 6 to 5.

“It is proposed to reduce the size of the basement from 1178sqm (as approved) to 750sqm. This is below ground level and will not have a material impact.”

In the revised floor plan Project Park Royal – Document 120437 A 105 C Typical floor plans and sections, the basement, still listed as ‘Basement Storage’, has been remodelled as a rectangular space and reduced in size to 750 square metres from 1178 sq metres, i.e. a reduction of 428 square metres compared to the original submission. This new 750 sq metre size, as a rectangular area, is roughly 19 metres * 38 metres. See revised floor plans. While a smaller basement does not necessarily mean a smaller vault, the basement size was more than likely reduced specifically because the vault size had been reduced.

If this was the case, then its possible that Deutsche Bank communicated to G4S that the vault size was to be reduced due to gold bullion exiting London for Asia (via Switzerland) in 2012 and especially during early 2013, and a fear that the previous planned size for the vault would be too big for the intended London bullion activity requirements.

The floor plan diagram specifying the reduced basement was actually created on 26 April 2013, which is coincidentally the week following the historic two-day gold price smash that occurred over Friday 13th and Monday 16th April 2013. Said another way, the amended planning application which specified the basement size reduction was submitted 2 weeks before the historic gold price smash of 13-16 April 2013, and the application amendment to the floor plans was granted the week after the historic gold price smash of 13-16 April 2013.

When the Deutsche/G4S vault opened in June 2014, Reuters reported that the vault’s capacity was 1,500 tonnes of gold. It’s not clear if this capacity statistic was the capacity from a larger vault that would have been in the larger basement area, i.e. 1178 sq mtrs, which a source may have supplied to Reuters at an earlier time, or whether it referred to a smaller vault within the smaller and revised 750 sq mtr basement area. For if the vault can now hold 1,500 tonnes of gold within a smaller basement, the original basement, being 57% larger, may have been designed to hold in excess of 2,300 tonnes of gold.

It’s either a fortunate or unfortunate set of timings that Deutsche/G4S applied to reduce the size of one of the largest ever precious metals vaults in London within a few weeks of the gold price being critically injured by huge gold futures contract short trading over the 13-16 April 2013 period. It would be interesting to know who made the decision to reduce the area of the basement, and on what rationale this decision was based.

Again, as to how much precious metal, if any, Deutsche Bank ever processed or held in the Park Royal vault is debatable, since a) the vault was not operational until June 2014 and b) Deutsche Bank was rapidly exiting the London Gold Market at that time. It therefore makes this LinkedIn profile of the person who actually performed the job of Precious Metals Manager at the vault all the more interesting, a role which is stated to have lasted from December 2013 to May 2015, but a profile in which the references to physically related precious metal activities just refer to the job spec bullet points, and the achievements listed predominantly concern the vault and not the contents of the vault.

Likewise, the ‘Bullion Operations Manager‘ at the G4S vault, a vault which was exclusively for Deutsche’s clients, must have seen fallow periods in which no metal passed over the vault’s threshold with the LinkedIn profile predominantly listing job spec bullet points. However, interestingly, the profile refers to ‘Leasing with [a] major financial corporation to ensure compliance to contractual agreements‘, so there were, as would be the case, contractual agreements between Deutsche and G4S. On the Deutsche side, these contractual agreements would raise the question of what penalties, if any, Deutsche Bank incurred in exiting contractual obligations with G4S, and whether Deutsche would have received a get-out exemption by delivering ICBC Standard Bank as the willing recipient of the vault lease.

Galliford Try

The planning applications submitted to Brent Council also include a “Method Statement & Logistics Plan” report written by the construction contractor Galliford Try for the project. On its website, Gallilford Try describes its Construction division as “a leading construction company, carrying out building and infrastructure works across the UK.”

Galliford Try’s Method Statement & Logistics Plan report, which is useful as a comparison benchmark to the actual construction that was completed, reckoned that the construction would take 50 weeks to complete, which probably explains why the vault and building was only complete in mid-2014, given that the amended planning application was only granted by Brent Council on 22 April 2013. It still however does not help in explaining why Deutsche Bank initially thought in 2012 that the vault would be ready for its clients to use in 2013.

Crucially, page 4 of the Galliford Try report, in a section titled “Internal Finishes (weeks 27-50)“, sub-section “Basement (weeks 26 -40)“, confirms that “Once the ceiling grid works have been completed the steel / vault doors will be installed“, which proves beyond doubt that the vault is located in the basement of the G4S operating centre. There are also kitchen and toilet areas in the basement as per other London subterranean precious metals vaults.

On page 3, when discussing the basement excavation and basement concrete slab floor, it also states that “Pockets will be formed in the floor for the fitting of the security doors etc“, and that “the lift pits…will be installed.”

From page 2:

From page 3:

From page 4:

The Park Royal site on which G4S built the operating centre and vault was first put on the market in November 2011 by Clay Street Property Consultants. The site occupies 1.89 acres and was sold (presumably to a G4S related company) in April 2012 for £4.5 million:

291 Abbey Road & 2-4 Penny Road, Park Royal , London

Marketed in November 2011 the 1.89 acre site attracted a broad range of interest including institutional investors, property companies, developers and owner occupiers.

Securing 15 bids all at in excess of the asking price the site was sold in April 2012 to an owner occupier for £4,500,000 reflecting a price of £2.38m per acre.

A Google Earth image from July 2013 shows the site with the new development in full flight, and the construction of the basement in progress, and so allows a determination of whether the construction was following the last set of plans approved by Brent Council:

Google Earth July 2013

Zooming in on the construction of the basement area from July 2013, the image shows the rectangular darker area where the vault was being positioned, and the lift-pits to the right of the image, one lift shaft at the front, and two towards the rear, which would be adjacent to the truck loading bays. This shape is very much in keeping with the basement size reduction to 750 square metres in the ultimate set of plans approved by Brent Council.

Basement Excavation – July 2013

Finally, a Google Earth image from June 2015 shows an aerial view of the completed G4S development.

Google Earth June 2015

Conclusion

The hasty exit of Deutsche Bank from the London Gold Market has never been adequately explained by the media. It remains an elephant in the room that the mainstream media does not seem to want to touch. The composition and operating mechanisms of the private LPMCL club is also another elephant in the room that mainstream media journalists have never adequately analysed and are unlikely to do so.

Now that ICBC Standard Bank has taken on the remaining term of the 10 year G4S lease that was vacated by Deutsche Bank, the key questions for ICBC are to what use will the state-controlled Chinese bank put this precious metals vault to, and whether the 5 incumbent LPMCL members will formally (along with the Bank of England informally) give the go-ahead to allow ICBC become a member of the private syndicate that is London Precious Metals Clearing Limited. The other outstanding question is whether Standard Chartered will also be involved in any extension of membership of LPMCL.

Another little appreciated fact is that during the pitches for the replacements to the Gold Fixing and Silver Fixing auctions, most of the exchanges and companies making the pitches, such as, CME, LME, ICE, all offered working solutions that included centralised on-exchange clearing of precious metals for the London Gold and Silver Markets. These solutions were even included in the various presentation materials of CME, ICE and LME, and made it into market presentations and press releases etc, however, the LBMA and its various associated accomplishes such as the LPMCL, pushed back completely on any part of solution that would have encroached on the existing LMPCL clearing mechanism.

The question of why LMPCL was so ‘precious’ that it needed protection from a transparent on-exchange clearing platform is also a question that mainstream financial journalists seem to have entirely missed. I will write a future blog post on LPMCL so as to shed some light on this thoroughly protected private syndicate of bullion bank clearers.

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About Ronan Manly

Ronan Manly is an investment professional and research analyst originally from Ireland. Ronan's aim in this blog is to shine a spotlight on the monetary gold market by sharing research and observations.